MA Top 30 Professional: Matthew Ozawa

Stage Director and Chief Artistic Administration Officer
Lyric Opera of Chicago

As a young man, Matthew Ozawa entered Oberlin College and Conservatory hoping to be a professional clarinetist. But when faced with a dire orchestral job market, his parents, of all people, offered up an alternative: What about directing?

Good call. Ozawa, 42, has become one of the most indemand opera directors in the country for his incisive spins on standard repertoire, although his catalog also  encompasses everything from Sweeney Todd and A Little Night Music to new works by Huang Ruo (Angel Island, An American Soldier) and Matthew Aucoin (Second Nature).

In 2020, Ozawa lost nine productions to the shutdown, including a Fidelio for San Francisco Opera that starkly evoked a migrant detention center rather than a standard prison. (The production helped reopen SFO in 2021 and has since gone onto the Canadian Opera Company and Lyric Opera of Chicago.) But the total reset of the pandemic and accompanying racial (re)awakening encouraged him to radicalize his directorial approach. One of his most well-traveled productions has become a Madama Butterfly that sets the opera not in Japan but in a modern-day Pinkerton’s orientalist fantasy of Japan, as glimpsed through a VR headset.

“It told me that there was a way forward, like Fidelio. Everyone who loved the tradition still loved it, and then people who hated Butterfly because [they] feel ‘othered’ by it, don’t like the appropriation, or don’t like how women are treated, came away feeling so empowered,” he says.

Ozawa is keenly aware that he is one of few Asians working in the field at his level. When he began directing, he was the only Asian American opera director in the country; when he joined Lyric Opera of Chicago’s staff in 2007, he says he was the first Asian to work not just in the company but in the entire building. Now, as Lyric’s chief artistic administration officer—a newly created position—Ozawa is essentially the general director’s “right hand.”

“Ultimately, the goal is to create an experience for thousands of people that is transformative,” he says.