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ERIC FRAAD BIOGRAPHY A native of New York City, Eric Fraad is one of the most original and provocative opera and theatre directors of his generation. He is also known as an innovative artistic director and producer having led ground-breaking arts organizations in Europe and America. His most recent productions have been for the Dublin based Early Music performance ensemble eX for which he serves as Artistic Director. With eX he has directed Christ Lag in Todes Banden (2007), an hallucinatory staging of Bach’s first cantata and the sources that inspired it and Ex Tenebris (2006), a dance theatre piece set to Christmas music of the middle ages and the renaissance. He studied music composition and philosophy at Bard College and the University of the Pacific and holds an MBA from Columbia University. Eric was awarded two consecutive grants from the National Opera Institute (National Endowment for the Arts) for Stage Direction and spent two years at the English National Opera assisting the Director of Productions, Colin Graham as well as working at Opéra National de Belgique, the Old Vic and Opera North (Leeds). In the United States he has worked on the staff of San Francisco Opera, San Diego Opera, Central City Opera and Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. Productions of Puccini’s Tosca at Los Angeles Opera and Verdi’s Rigoletto at Pennsylvania Opera Theatre received major international attention and established his reputation as a director intent on experimenting with form and devising radical new interpretations of the classics. In 1984 he founded Opera at the Academy at the New York Academy of Art in New York. Together with Associate Director Christopher Alden and his brother David, Mr. Eric built what was to become the most experimental, exciting and critically acclaimed opera organization in New York of the 1980’s and early 1990’s. During these years he was a protégé of the great American impresario Joseph Papp, directing and producing numerous operas in association with The New York Shakespeare Festival (The Public Theater). Andy Warhol filmed his production of The Magic Flute and subsequently broadcast it on MTV. Along with producing full-scale operas, Opera at the Academy featured a year round training institute whose faculty included luminaries from the worlds of opera and theatre. In 1993 he joined with Producer Paula Heil Fisher to form a new company, Millennial Arts Productions for which he was Artistic Director. Millennial Arts located at the City Center theatre in New York, was founded to create spectacle that reflected the emerging trends that were transforming society at the turn of the millennium. The company produced works for Broadway, off Broadway, film and productions that created a new synthesis between drama, dance, music and opera. These meta-musical theatre productions have become his signature works. His staging of Handel’s Messiah with costumes by Hussein Chalayan created a stir in New York and at the Utrecht Early Music Festival (2000). Esther (1998) praised by New York Magazine as, “a miraculous marriage of Handel and Racine” featured the debut of counter tenor Bejun Mehta. Other creations all performed in New York include, The Rape of the Lock (1999), Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater (1999) and Carissimi’s Jeptha (1998) both with Derek Lee Ragin, Stravinsky’s Pulcinella (1997), Bach’s cantata, Ein Feste Burg ist Unser Gott (1996), and The Rubbayat of Omar Khayyam (1995). Between 2001 and 2004 Eric served as Director of The Ark in Dublin, Europe’s only major cultural centre for young audiences and families. His cutting edge theatre productions for The Ark toured the country and won several awards and nominations including one for Best Production at the ESB Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards for his staging of Jocelyn Clarke’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKeane’s graphic novella The Day I Swapped My Dad for 2 Goldfish. At The Ark he commissioned and directed several new works for the stage including plays with Booker Prize winners John Banville and Roddy Doyle. Between 2004 and 2006 he lived in Paris and New York and resumed working with Millennial Arts Productions. He was Artistic Advisor for the company’s full-length documentary Finding Eleazar as well as playing a contentious video director in the film. Finding Eleazar was an official selection at the Tribeca, Savannah, Montreal and Haifa Film Festivals and was released theatrically in New York. He is presently preparing a new production for eX, Three Lessons on Darkness, a work inspired by the music of François Couperin.