Directors // Douglas Fitch

Doug Fitch has worked in media ranging from architecture and opera to puppetry and food. His work as a designer and director was most recently seen in the critically-acclaimed production of Le Grand Macabre at the New York Philharmonic, using an innovative live-filmed and projected miniature theater. Doug's first production that used this technique was A Soldier's Tale, featuring Pinchus Zuckerman, principals from the New York Philharmonic, F. Murray Abraham and Marian Seldes at Avery Fisher Hall. It then appeared again at The National Arts Center in Ottawa, Canada. The miniature theater evolved further with a new production of Peter and the Wolf that premiered with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Other projects include designing and directing Elliot Carter's only opera, What Next?, in a production conducted by James Levine that was filmed and premiered shown at the Museum of Modern Art. Doug has also designed and staged productions of Turandot, for the Santa Fe Opera, Hansel and Gretel for the Los Angeles Opera, Das Rheingold for the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (also for Tanglewood), as well as several productions mounted by the National Symphony Orchestra, at the Kennedy Center including L'Enfant et les sortileges and Abduction from the Seraglio. Recently at Bard College for Dawn Upshaw, he created a double-bill production of Four Saints in Three Acts with the world premier of A Bird in Your Ear, by David Bruce. At Wolf Trap, for the NSO, he staged a version of Swan Lake, with light, shadow, a single dancer and a child narrator. Other projects include Through Roses with the New World Symphony and symphonic visualizations of Britten's Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes; Siegfried, Third Act and Petroushka, as artist in residence at the University of Maryland.

Doug's projects have taken him around the world, where he has designed productions in Russia, made sculpture in Japan, furniture in Italy and the Philippines and had a number of exhibitions of drawings and paintings in Germany. He has created a number of performance installation feasts involving whole villages in France and designed and constructed the interior and furniture for a home for violinist Joshua Bell. In a traveling exhibition of drawings and painted sculptures collectively entitled Organs of Emotion, he proposed a new design for the human anatomy aimed at better serving the life of emotions. An exhibition of tactile pictures, called Mit Haut und Haaren, is currently traveling around Germany.