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, a “blindingly impressive” (NY Times) collective of singers, dancers, and instrumentalists; he is also Producing Artistic Director of Little Island, leading the programming and producing of a summer season of 9 world premieres starting June 2024; he served as Artistic Director of NYPopsUp, a sprawling state initiative to reopen the performing arts across NY State with over 300 performances from February to July 2020; and 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 NYTimes, Washington Post, NY 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” (New York Times) production ofThe 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; his “darkly captivating” (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; Sondheim’s A Little Night Music with the Nederlandse Reisopera in collaboration with design firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero and visual artist Cynthia Talmadge; a new production of Hans Werner Henze’s El Cimarrón starring Davóne Tines, also at the Met Museum; and a new piece for the Los Angeles Dance Project at the Luma Foundation in Arles, France. He has also directed Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea starring Anthony Roth Costanzo at the Cincinnati Opera; an immersive pairing of Gluck’s Orfeo and Matthew Aucoin’s Orphic Moment at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater; Monteverdi’s Il ballo delle Ingrate with William Christie, Il Barbiere di Siviglia with Lotte de Beer at the Dutch National Opera and Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie with Stephen Wadsworth at Juilliard.
In 2017 Winokur co-founded AMOC (American Modern Opera Company) with composer Matthew Aucoin. AMOC is an ensemble of singers, musicians, and dancers committed to creating a body of new, discipline-colliding music-theater works. Described by the LATimes as “revitalizing what American music theater can mean with several of our most revolutionary young talents” and “preternaturally talented,” by the NYTimes, AMOC curated the Ojai Festival in 2022, ran an annual Run AMOC! Festival at the American Repertory Theater from 2017-2019, 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, Massachusetts and is a graduate of The Juilliard School.