TALENT: Director/Producer

Ethan Heard is a director, producer, and teacher who makes theater to build community and foster love. He is Co-Founder & Artistic Director of Heartbeat Opera, “a categorically imaginative company, which has made its name with vital reshapings of repertory operas” (The New Yorker). He teaches acting and directing at Yale School of Drama and Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

With Heartbeat Opera, Ethan has directed Breathing Free: a visual album (Drama League Award nominee), Lady M: an online fantasia of Verdi’s Macbeth, La Susanna (a co-production with Opera Lafayette), Fidelio, Butterfly, Dido & Aeneas, Kafka-Fragments, The Seven Deadly Sins, and the original drag-opera-extravaganzas Hot Mama: Singing Gays Saving Gaia, Dragus Maximus: a homersexual opera odyssey, All the World’s a Drag! Shakespeare in love…with opera, Queens of the Night: Mozart in Space, Miss Handel, and The Fairy Queen. These productions have been called “urgent and powerful” (The New York Times), “relevant and heartbreaking” (The New Yorker), and “incisive and inspired” (Opera News); and they have traveled to the Kennedy Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Broad Stage, Mondavi Center, and Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, among others. Other opera productions include the world premieres of Rene Orth and Mark Campbell’s Empty the House (Curtis Institute of Music) and Jason Cady, Aaron Siegel and Matthew Welch’s Sisyphus (Experiments in Opera), Erismena and L’Orfeo (Yale Baroque Opera Project), L’incoronazione di Poppea (Princeton University), and Pierrot Lunaire (Yale Cabaret).

Recent musical theater projects include: Mel Marvin and Jonathan Levi’s Truth & Reconciliation, Marisa Michelson’s Desire|Divinity Project, Little Shop of Horrors (nominated for five Berkshire Theatre Awards including Outstanding Direction), Bells Are Ringing starring Kate Baldwin and Graham Rowat, A Little Night Music starring Kate Baldwin, Gregg Edelman, and Phillipa Soo (Berkshire Theatre Group), the world premiere of Mark Campbell and Marisa Michelson’s The Other Room starring Phoebe Strole (Inner Voices), Sunday in the Park with George (Yale School of Drama), Merrily We Roll Along (Yale Dramat), Next to Normal, Into the Woods, The Producers, and The Luckiest Girl (Princeton). Ethan remounted The Secret for John Rando and Broadway Asia in Shanghai. Plays include: Will Eno’s Middletown (The New School), Megan Loughran and Alex Trow’s F Theory (NJ Rep), Dorothy Fortenberry’s Partners (American Academy of Dramatic Arts), Amelia Roper’s Lottie in the Late Afternoon, MJ Kaufman’s Eligible Receivers, and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (YSD), John Willard’s The Cat and the Canary (BTG), The Gay Ivy (Dixon Place), Ellen McLaughlin’s Iphigenia and Other Daughters and Proof (Santa Fe Theater Festival), Young Jean Lee’s Pullman WA, and Lauren Yee’s in a word (Williamstown Workshop).

While earning his MFA at Yale School of Drama, Ethan served as Artistic Director of Yale Cabaret, where he co-created Basement Hades (with original music by Daniel Schlosberg) and Trannequin! (a musical about a transgender mannequin); he also launched the tradition of Yale School of Drag, which continues today. He received his BA in Theater Studies from Yale College and won the Sledge Prize for Performing Arts. He toured the world with the Yale Whiffenpoofs, singing more than 200 concerts in 25 countries. He has assisted Thomas Kail, Nicholas Martin, John Guare, Steve Cosson, Mark Brokaw, Gilbert Blin, and Annette Jolles at Williamstown, The Public, Boston Early Music Festival, Avery Fisher Hall, Yale Institute of Musical Theater, and NYMF. He was a director in Oskar Eustis and Suzan-Lori Parks’ Collaboration Reloaded at NYU. He has also taught at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, The O’Neill Theater Center, and The New School.

Ethan is biracial, Chinese-American, queer, proficient in Mandarin, and a proud member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.