Zack Winokur
About this Artist
Director and producer Zack Winokur is recognized as one of the most innovative and exciting talents working in theater and opera today. Recent highlights include directing Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Santa Fe Opera and a new production of Messiaen’s Harawi with Julia Bullock, Conor Hanick, Bobbi Jene Smith, and Or Schraiber at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. Winokur is Artistic Director of AMOC (American Modern Opera Company), a “blindingly impressive” (The New York Times) collective of singers, dancers, and instrumentalists; he is Producing Artistic Director of Little Island in New York City; he served as Artistic Director of NYPopsUp, a sprawling initiative to reopen the performing arts across New York State with over 300 performances from February to July 2020; and he co-teaches, with Davóne Tines, a transdisciplinary storytelling class at Harvard.
Other career highlights include co-creating and directing Only an Octave Apart (“Best of 2021” in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and New York Magazine) at St. Ann’s Warehouse and starring Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Roth Costanzo; EASTMAN, a commission from Little Island’s inaugural festival centering the work and life of composer Julius Eastman; his “rich, seamless” (The New York Times) production of The Black Clown, an adaptation of the Langston Hughes poem starring Davóne Tines with music by Michael Schachter, at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center and the American Repertory Theater; and his “darkly captivating” (The New York Times) production of Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine, with music by Tyshawn Sorey, text by Claudia Rankine, and starring Julia Bullock on the grand staircase of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In 2017 Winokur co-founded AMOC with composer Matthew Aucoin. AMOC is committed to creating a body of new, discipline-colliding music-theater works. Described by the Los Angeles Times as “revitalizing what American music theater can mean with several of our most revolutionary young talents” and “preternaturally talented,” by the The New York Times, AMOC curated the Ojai Festival in 2022, ran an annual Run AMOC! Festival at the American Repertory Theater from 2017 to 2019, has held major teaching and performance residencies at Harvard and Brown universities, was Artist-in-Residence at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, performed a new version of John Adams’ El Niño arranged specially for the company at the Met Cloisters and now annually at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and has made appearances at the Big Ears Festival, Clark Art Institute, and Rockport Chamber Music Festival.
Winokur was born in Boston and is a graduate of The Juilliard School.