Pierre Audi Director

Born in Beirut, Pierre Audi founded the Almeida Theatre and its contemporary music festival in 1979 and was its director until 1989.From 1988 to 2018, he was Artistic Director of the National Opera in Amsterdam, where he created most of his productions. He has worked with renowned visual artists such as Karel Appel, Georg Baselitz, Anish Kapoor, Herzog & de Meuron, Jannis Kounellis and Jonathan Meese. 

At the same time, Pierre Audi has staged numerous contemporary music works, such as Morton Feldman's Neither, Claude Vivier's Rêves d'un Marco Polo, Stockhausen's Aus Licht, and the world premieres of works by Wolfgang Rihm, Hans Werner Henze, Tan Dun, Param Vir, Kaija Saariaho, Alexander Knaifel. He has been invited by the Bayerische Staatsoper Munich (Henze's Venus and Adonis, Parsifal), the Salzburg Festival (The Magic Flute, Dionysius), the Drottningholm Court Theatre (Tamerlano, Alcina, Zoroaster), the Paris Opera (La Juive, Tosca), the Vienna Staatsoper (Rigoletto), the Theater an der Wien (Partenope), La Monnaie de Bruxelles (Pelléas et Mélisande, Iphigénie en Aulide, Iphigénie en Tauride, Orlando, Tamerlano, Alcina), the New York Metropolitan Opera (Attila, Guillaume Tell), the Ruhrtriennale (Gisela!), the Teatro Real in Madrid (Bomarzo by Ginastera). 

He has directed the world premieres of Julian Anderson's Thebans, Pascal Dusapin's Penthesilee, Louis Andriessen's Theatre of the World and Samuel Beckett's Fin de Partie by György Kurtág, staged at the Paris Opera last Season. 

In 2018, he took over the direction of the Aix-en-Provence Festival. He is also the Artistic Director of the Park Avenue Armory in New York since 2015. He has received numerous awards for his productions, including the Lesley Boosey Award, the Dutch Critics' Prize, the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Prize, the Silver Medal of the City of Amsterdam awarded, the first Johannes Vermeer Award. 

In 2021, he directed the premiere of The Arab Apocalypse by Samir Odeh-Tamimi at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, and early 2022, Rigoletto (Vienna Staatsoper), Orphée et Euridice (Maggio Musicale Fiorentino) and Parsifal (Bayerische Staatsoper).