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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.