Jonathon Field
BA, University of Washington, 1973
MFA, University of Washington, 1977
Jonathon Field has become one of America’s more versatile and popular stage directors.
From 2000 through 2006 he served as artistic director of Lyric Opera Cleveland, where he presented the operas of Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti, and the Ohio premieres of works by John Adams, Mark Adamo, and Philip Glass. Field received a Northern Ohio Live Award for his work on Don Giovanni in Cleveland, which was called “an electrifying production that has come to be the hallmark of Field’s tenure.”
Field directed the American premiere of Lost Highway, an opera based on the David Lynch film that played to sold-out performances at the Miller Theater in New York. He directed the world premiere of the jazz opera Leave Me Alone in a partnership between Oberlin Conservatory and Real Time Opera, which was one of the first operas to broadcast live on the internet. His productions for Lyric Opera of Chicago of Trouble in Tahiti, Gianni Schicchi, The Old Maid and the Thief, and The Spanish Hour were successfully revived at the Illinois Humanities Festival.
He directed touring productions of La Cenerentola and Die Fledermaus for San Francisco Opera’s Western Opera Theatre, which played in more than 20 states. In recent years Field directed 10 productions with Arizona Opera, being deemed by the press “their most perceptive stage director.”
Field has been praised for his international work, having directed The Riverboat Show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Dido and Aeneas at Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, and Suor Angelica and Menotti’s Amalia al Ballo at the Urbania Festival in Italy. He has collaborated with such esteemed artists as Teresa Zylis-Gara, Jerome Hines, Pablo Elvira, Giorgio Tozzi, and Angelina Reux.
