Yuval Sharon is creating an unconventional body of work that seeks to expand the operatic form. He is the founding Artistic Director of The Industry in Los Angeles, a company devoted to new and experimental opera that has brought opera into unconventional spaces. Sharon was honored with a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship and a Foundation for Contemporary Art grant for theater. In August 2024 he was chosen to direct the Metropolitan Opera’s next staging of Wagner’s Ring cycle. He is currently serving as the Gary L. Wasserman Artistic Director at the Detroit Opera and as the inaugural Global Solutions Visiting Fellow at the Neubauer Collegium. At this talk, he discussed the ideas explored in his new book, A New Philosophy of Opera (Liveright, 2024), in conversation with two of his research collaborators at UChicago: David Levin (Germanic Studies, Cinema & Media Studies, TAPS) and Samir Mayekar (Associate Vice President and Managing Director, Polsky Center).