Netia Jones

Netia Jones is an award-winning director, designer and video artist working internationally in opera, theatre, concerts and immersive installation projects. She created the film-and-theatre blended Orphée by Philip Glass for English National Opera, the award-winning virtual reality opera Current, Rising for the Royal Opera House and the acclaimed live animation production of Where the Wild Things Are with Maurice Sendak and Oliver Knussen for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Aldeburgh Festival and the Barbican. She has conceived and created multiple new works including the Ivor Novello and Olivier Award-nominated opera Least Like the Other, Searching for Rosemary Kennedy, with composer Brian Irvine for Irish National Opera and The Royal Opera, and the genre-defying Everlasting Light, a site-specific performance with music by composers from Gesualdo to Ligeti and projection mapping onto Sizewell Nuclear Power Station, for the Aldeburgh Festival.

Recent projects include Pelléas et Mélisande for Santa Fe Opera, Electric Fields, with Katia & Marielle Labèque, Barbara Hannigan and David Chalmin, for the LA Phil, A Soldiers Tale with Esa-Pekka Salonen for the San Francisco Symphony, Le nozze di Figaro with Gustavo Dudamel and Louis Langrée for the Opéra National de Paris, A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Santa Fe Opera, Macbeth for New Zealand Opera, Amadigi and Die Zauberflöte for Garsington Opera, and the critically acclaimed An Anatomy of Melancholy with countertenor Iestyn Davies and psychoanalyst Darian Leader for the Barbican. For Lincoln Center in New York, Barbican theatre, Shanghai Grand Theatre and Perth Festival, she created The Dark Mirror, a staging with film of Zender’s Winterreise with tenor Ian Bostridge, and site-specific performances of Curlew River for Lincoln Centre, Barbican and Cal Performances. Her other projects include Atthis and Kafka Fragments for The Royal Opera, Messiah and Tan Dun’s Marco Polo for Bergen International Festival, The Outcast for Wien Modern Festival, Elbphilharmonie and Ensemble Intercontemporain, Verklärte Nacht for Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre de Chambre de Paris and Bergen National Opera, Erwartung, Bergen Festival, and Les Illuminations (Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Scottish Ensemble).

For the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Barbican Centre, she continued her pioneering live interactive film and animation with the work of Ralph Steadman for Unsuk Chin’s opera Alice in Wonderland, and together with Lightmap, the multimedia studio she founded in 2010, she has created site-specific multimedia performances including The Way to the Sea, a performance installation across a whole coastal village (Aldeburgh Festival), Before Life and After, in a 19t-century engineering works and along an abandoned railway, and a three-month installation around Messiaen’s Louange à l’étérnité de Jésus at the South Bank Center, London, along with live and interactive film for concerts of music by Schoenberg, Purcell, Stravinsky, Handel, Bartók, Britten, Blow, Dowland, Berio, Couperin and Conlon Nancarrow.