MA Top 30 Professional: Mary Birnbaum

General and Artistic Director, Opera Saratoga
Dramatic Advisor for Master of Music and Graduate Diploma, The Juilliard School

The thrill of working in theater and opera was imprinted on Mary Birnbaum at a young age. As a child, she performed in the Children’s Chorus of the Metropolitan Opera, sharing stage time with greats like Denyce Graves and Dawn Upshaw—a funny connection that resurfaced when Upshaw later hired Birnbaum to teach at Bard College.

Like many young impassioned musicians, Birnbaum initially aspired to perform. With time, she turned to directing. “I wanted to have my ideas onstage,” she says. She studied at Harvard and at L’École Jacques Lecoq in Paris (the physical theater and movement school whose alumnae include William Kentridge and Julie  Taymor), then returned to New York to found a site-specific theater company and “hustle for directing jobs.”

An important moment came when Birnbaum served as Steven Wadsworth’s associate director for the Seattle Opera’s 2013 production of Wagner’s Ring cycle. Thereafter, her work in opera quickly outpaced that in theater. She drew on her education at Lecoq to inform her productions. “I think it felt really new to singers to be working in that way, to be called upon to be collaborators in the room,” she reflected.

Birnbaum’s credits are numerous, esteemed, and growing. She’s directed acclaimed productions of the classics all over the world while increasingly gaining a reputation for new work. Her production of In a Grove at the 2025 Prototype Festival was called one of the best classical performances of the year by The New York Times. Never one to rest on her laurels, Birnbaum is focused on upcoming projects such as an operatic adaptation The Many Deaths of Laila Starr—a graphic novel that explores questions of immortality and the meaning of life—and, at the other end of the high/low art spectrum, an opera based on The Real Housewives of New York. The range, she says, “delights” her. “The irreverent part of it is exactly who I am as an artist,” she says.