LouisaMuller

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  • Director

About Louisa

A finalist in the 2020 International Opera Awards in the Best Newcomer category, American director Louisa Muller is quickly rising to prominence for her versatility and work of "complex finesse". Louisa’s recent production of The Turn of the Screw for Garsington Opera was the recipient of a Royal Philharmonic Society Award and named by The Guardian as one of the Top Ten Classical Music Performances of the Year. She is also a recent finalist in both the “Director” and “Newcomer” categories of the International Opera Awards.

Her new production of Dame Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers for the Houston Grand Opera was a widely-heralded debut and she received rich critical acclaim for her staging of Das Rheingold with the New York Philharmonic, which the New York Times called “riveting…a remarkable evening of music theater” and named among its list of the Best Classical Music Performances of the Year.

She has created new productions of Platée for Garsington Opera, La traviata for Santa Fe Opera, Handel's Amadigi di Gaula for Boston Baroque - reviving the latter for Philharmonia Baroque - and both The Rake’s Progress and Dialogues des Carmélites for The Juilliard School. In addition, she has directed concert stagings of Ariadne auf Naxos at the Edinburgh International Festival and Don Giovanni at the Royal Conservatory Antwerp.

Productions in the 2025/26 season include The Bartered Bride for the Irish National Opera, Le nozze di Figaro for Opera North and La traviata for Garsington Opera.

Louisa is based in London

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Contact

Keiron Cooke

Keiron Cooke

Associate Director

Representation

European management with Askonas Holt

Partner Managers:
Sempre Artists (General)

Season Highlights

Nov 2025 - Dec 2025
Irish National Opera (Tour)
Smetana THE BARTERED BRIDE
Jan 2026 - Mar 2026
Opera North
Mozart LE NOZZE DI FIGARO
May 2026 - Jul 2026
Garsington Opera
Verdi LA TRAVIATA

News

Press

  • Britten's Turn of the Screw

    Garsington Opera
    Jul 2022
    • Although Muller directs with an impressively light touch, her staging is bursting with the sort of connective, proliferating detail that hooks the audience into the story, and she fields the many directorial cues Britten wrote into his score with a disarming elegance. Of the many productions I've seen of this work, I reckon that, for subtlety and layers of meaning, Muller's is in a league of its own.

      • Peter Reed, Opera Magazine
      • 01 September 2022
    • Louisa Muller directed the production in 2019 and returned to revive it here, preserving the ambiguity – did the Governess see these things or imagine them? Are we viewing her fantasies, like Macbeth’s dagger “proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain”, driven by a frustrated attraction to the employer she must never contact? Muller’s production bears both interpretations, as it should. She has a sure touch for an eerie detail. In the Prologue the guardian’s intimate stroking of the face of the woman to whom he has just subcontracted the raising of his “poor little things”, is the subtlest of transgressions. It is a chilling moment when Miles repeats the exact gesture in Act 2, still more unsettling in the combative context their relationship has assumed.

  • Britten's Turn of the Screw

    Garsington Opera
    Jul 2019
    • ‘A deliberate, powerful and horribly successful study of the magic of evil,’ is how one critic described Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw on its publication in 1898. The same words very much apply to Louisa Muller’s new Garsington staging of Britten’s opera, a beautiful, unsettling piece of theatre that sifts through the work’s ambiguities with a subtlety that in itself has something of the complex finesse of James’s prose…A truly great achievement, devastating and unforgettable.

  • Wagner's Das Rheingold

    New York Philharmonic Orchestra
    Jun 2017
    • …the Philharmonic, Mr. Gilbert and the director Louisa Muller have stripped the work to its sinews. It is a stark vision—you might be reminded of Ivo Van Hove's scorched-earth approach to classic plays—that pares away almost everything but the music and the characters.…it was a remarkable evening of music theater.

  • Britten's The Rape of Lucretia

    Wolf Trap Opera
    Jun 2016
    • …an intense wallop of a well-sung production.…this opera, as presented and gently updated by director Louisa Muller, was at times downright monumental in its statements, with even its whispers sheathed in iron.

    • Louisa Muller's staging was simple and dramatically effective, with Erhard Rom's set evoking the marble and rusticated stone of a Roman setting, while the costumes of the soldiers suggested a modern American present.

  • Corigliano's Ghosts of Versailles

    Wolf Trap Opera
    Jul 2015
    • It is a dazzling thing all around.…The opportunity to hear a modern work of this stature comes along all too rarely, a production of this quality still rarer.

    • Chances are that Wolf Trap Opera will be using its production of John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles as a touchstone for a long time to come. The venture was satisfying on every level.…The complex layers…inspired deftly detailed stage direction from Louisa Muller, who kept the action fresh and involving.

    • Directed by Louisa Muller, this production is as silly as it is masterful, and is perfect for people who are new to the Opera...