Stephen Kitsakos

STEPHEN KITSAKOS is a theatre director, opera librettist and educator. For the American
composer, Sheila Silver, he wrote libretti for "The Wooden Sword", winner of the 2009
Sackler Prize for Composition, "The White Rooster: A Tale of Compassion" for the
Smithsonian Institution, and for the Seattle Opera, "A Thousand Splendid Suns", adapted
from the book by Khaled Hosseini. With the composer Martin Hennessy he wrote the
opera-theatre monologues "An Incident in Sutton Square", "The Woman in Penthouse A" and
"The Pleasing Recollection of the Past". A graduate of NYU and the BMI Workshops, his
experience as an opera-theatre writer and educator has informed his approach to
directing. From 2000-2013 Kitsakos was on the full-time Theatre Arts Faculty at SUNY
New Paltz in New York’s Hudson Valley. During those years he was a contributing writer to
The Sondheim Review and Music in American Life. A recipient of grants and commissions from the Seattle Opera, National Endowment for the Arts, American Opera Projects, NYSCA, ASCAP, Florida Keys Council of the Arts, the BMI Foundation and the Episcopal Diocese of New York, his work as a librettist and theatre director has been seen in NYC at Theater Row, the National Opera Center and in major cities throughout the United States, Central and South America. He resides in Key
West, FL where he is an Artistic Associate of the multidisciplinary arts organization, The
Studios of Key West.