Peter Sellars (born September 27, 1957) is an American theatre director, noted for his unique contemporary stagings of classical and contemporary operas and plays. Sellars is professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he teaches Art as Social Action and Art as Moral Action. He is widely regarded as one of the key figures of theatre and opera of the last 50 years. Biography Early and middle career Sellars was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. His classmate Sloane Citron, a future magazine publisher, remembered Sellars as: Sellars attended Harvard University. As an undergraduate, he performed a puppet version of Wagner's Ring cycle, and directed a minimalist production of Three Sisters. Mature birch trees were placed on the stage apron at Loeb Drama Center and Chopin Nocturnes were played on a concert grand piano that could be seen through a suspended gauze box set. Sellars's production of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in the swimming pool of Harvard's Adams House brought press attention well beyond campus. This was also the case with his subsequent techno-industrial production of King Lear, which included a Lincoln Continental on stage and ambient musical moods by Robert Rutman's U.S. Steel Cello Ensemble. In his senior year, Sellars staged a production of Nikolai Gogol's The Inspector-General at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge. He graduated from Harvard in 1980. In the summer of 1980 he staged a production in New Hampshire of Don Giovanni, with the cast, costumed and presented to resemble a blaxploitation film. Don Giovanni partied almost-naked (underwear only) and shooting heroin. The production was performed under the aegis of the Monadnock Music Festival in Manchester, New Hampshire. Opera News hailed it as "an act of artistic vandalism". In the winter of 1980, Sellars' production of George Frideric Handel's Orlando, again at the American Repertory Theatre, brought him to national attention. He set the work in outer space. Later, Sellars studied theatre and related arts in Japan, China, and India. Sellars served as director of the Boston Shakespeare Company for the 1983–1984 season. His productions included an influential Pericles, Prince of Tyre and a staging of The Lighthouse, with music by British composer Peter Maxwell Davies. In 1983 he received a MacArthur Fellowship. Sellars was the original director of the 1983 Broadway musical My One and Only, a revisal of the George & Ira Gershwin show Funny