Elena Araoz is a stage director of theater, opera, multi-media performance, and theatrical large-scale immersive events, working internationally, Off-Broadway, and across the country. Elena is attracted to epic stories, and her productions are known for huge dance-like theatrics and acutely naturalistic acting. The New York Times has praised Araoz's productions as “form-busting and gorgeous,” “striking,” “primal,” “wild,” “stirring,” and “refreshingly natural,” The Boston Globe as “riveting,” “dreamy,” and “vivid,” and The New Yorker as “refreshing.” Time Out New York mentions, “Elena Araoz is a director with deep wells of imagination; she seems drawn to magical realist work.”
Elena is also a performer and holds her MFA in Acting from the University of Texas at Austin and recently appeared as a guest star on NBC’s New Amsterdam.
Elena is a founding member of the Obie-winning company The Sol Project, a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect, and she sits on the Board of Directors of The Drama League, the preeminent creative development home for directors. Elena is a faculty member at Princeton University’s Theater and Music Theater Program, which also houses Innovations in Socially Distant Performance, .her research and production lab. ISDP creates live virtual performance and its beginnings have been archived by the Library of Congress.
2025 will mark Elena’s world premiere direction of Mark St. Germain’s new play Mary Magdalene at Contemporary American Theatre Festival, the sixth annual 30-city national tour of her production of Sugar Skull! (a Día de Muertos musical celebrating Mexican folkloric and indigenous music, dance and traditions - performing at many American flagship performing arts centers), the fourth national tour of El Orto Oz with TheatreworksUSA., her workshop direction of Valen-Marie Santos’ Perreo (Public Theater), the world premiere production of Jorge Sosa’s opera Generación Perdida (Teatro Grattacielo),, and Catherine Filloux’s new play Third Person (Culture Lab). Elena is currently in development with writer-performer Marian Licha on her new solo play The House,, as well as joining frequent collaborator Virginia Grise on a new work at ArtsEmerson.
Recent projects include Elena’s new critically acclaimed production of the bilingual play Espejos: Clean by Christina Quintana at Studio Theatre in D.C, the critically acclaimed premiere production of Catharine Filloux’s How to Eat an Orange at La MaMa, the premiere of When Light Bends, a play with a song cycle and slight-of-hand magic inspired by the 2024 solar eclipse, produced by Media Art Xploration (MAX) in conjunction with performing arts centers and science centers within the eclipse’s path of totality, and How to Melt ICE by Amalia Oliva (Boundless Theater and New Perspectives Theatre),, for which Elena was honored with the Best Direction of a Drama Award by Premios LATA (Latin Alternative Theater Awards) and a nomination for an HOLA Award for Outstanding Production.
Also recently, The Dallas Opera released Elena’s 3D Immersive audio-only production of No One Is Forgotten: An Immersive Opera. The opera is composed by Paola Prestini and Sxip Shirey, based on the play by Winter Miller. Elena served as director and immersive designer of the opera in a never before created method.. The opera will receive a staged production at Princeton University in 2026, utilizing prototype sonic technology.
Senator Bill Bradley’s documentary film Rolling Along, produced by Spike Lee, premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival, on which Elena served as Artistic Consultant after having served as Dramaturg for the Senator’s stage production.
Elena’s opera credits include Florida Grand Opera’s El matrimonio secreto (a new Spanish translation of the Cimarosa opera), La traviata (New York City Opera at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House), Lucia di Lammermoor (Opera North), Falstaff (Brooklyn Philharmonic at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House), and choreography for Latin Lovers (Glimmerglass Opera). Her acclaimed operetta War Music, which she adapted with composer Paul Philips from Christopher Logue's retelling of the Iliad, and devised with six performers,, stages the Trojan War. War Music, commissioned by Aurea ensemble for the FirstWorksFestival in Providence, RI, was also presented by the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Skirball Center, Chicago Humanities Festival, the Chorus of Westerly, and toured New England.
Other NYC theatrical productions include the Off-Broadway world premiere of Adam Seidel’s Original Sound (Cherry Lane Theatre), Mac Wellman’s A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds (New York Theatre Workshop Next Door), María Irene Fornés’ Mud and Conduct of Life (Boundless Theatre Company), Migdalia Cruz’s Fur (New York Theatre Workshop Next Door), Catherine Filloux’s Kidnap Road (La MaMa), Octavio Solis’s Prospect (Boundless Theatre Company), Warren Leight’s Union Square Incident for The 24 Hour Plays on Broadway (American Airlines Theatre), and theatrical events for Anna Deavere Smith and the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, PEN America, and The Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
Regionally, Elena directed Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics (Barrington Stage, BroadwayWorld Berkshires Award for Best Play, among other awards), The Migration Plays by Mfoniso Udofia, Martyna Majok, Heather Raffo, Adam Gwon, and Karen Zacarias (McCarter Theatre Center), Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare Festival St, Louis), In Between (Walnut Street Theatre and international tour), Sweat (People’s Light),, the theatre/orchestra collaboration Azaan by Dipika Guha and Christopher Rogerson (Oregon Symphony), and the development process of Melinda Lopez’s new play Power Trio at The Huntington Theatre in Boston.
Two Arms and a Noise, which Elena wrote and last directed for the Bucharest International Theatre Platform in Romania, is a physical theatre piece about the life of an indigenous Peruvian woman which she originally created as a New York Theatre Workshop fellow and which was recognized on the Latinx Theatre Commons’ list of "plays and writers that everyone should know.” Internationally, she also directed the world premiere of Li Tong Chen's The Power in Beijing, the first English-language play commercially produced in Beijing, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Prague Shakespeare Festival in the Czech Republic.
With New York’s St. Fortune Collective, she directed the site-specific immersive Wood Music, which invited audiences to explore the theatrical event within and around the historic Florence Mill in Omaha and turned the entire building into a musical instrument for the audience to play, all in tune with the rock band nestled inside.
During the pandemic, Elena was on the frontier of virtual live theatre, having conceived and directed the interactive and theatrical website experience The Manic Monologues (McCarter Theatre Center) which was nominated for a 2021 Drama League Award and was honored as the Gold Award Winner for the 2021-2022 NASPA Excellence Award. She also directed the acclaimed premieres of Alice in the Pandemic and A Survivor’s Odyssey (White Snake Projects), which were the first virtual operas to live sync singers from remote locations, blended with CGI and facial motion capture. A Survivor’s Odyssey was remounted as a highlighted presentation for Opera America’s 2022 conference.
Elena’s 2020 virtual production of Virginia Grise’s a farm for meme was dubbed by The New York Times as “form-busting” for its unique combination of “box puppets, shadow play, live film and archival footage into a gorgeous mise-en-scène that feels theatrical in its purposefully homemade aesthetic.”
She worked extensively with the late Sir Jonathan Miller, most recently as Choreographer and Associate Director for his La traviata at Vancouver Opera, and worked on his Broadway King Lear starring Christopher Plummer, and multiple operas at Lincoln Center, Seattle Opera, BAM and Glimmerglass Opera. She served as Associate Director with Sir Richard Eyre on Ghosts at BAM. She also served as Assistant Director to Steven Soderbergh on The Library at The Public Theatre and Darko Tresnjak on Antony and Cleopatra at Theatre for a New Audience.
