Sellars will be recognized at the National Conference evening Gala on Saturday, January 10th at the Fairmont Copley Plaza where he is slated to provide closing remarks after accepting the award.

Peter Sellars has gained international recognition for his groundbreaking and transformative interpretations of classics, advocacy of 20th century and contemporary music, and collaborative projects with an extraordinary range of creative and performing artists. He has staged operas at the Dutch National Opera, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Opéra national de Paris, Salzburg Festival, San Francisco Opera and Teatro Real de Madrid among others. Sellars collaborated on the creation of many works with composer John Adams, including Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, El Niño, and Doctor Atomic.  He guided the creation of premiere productions of Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin, Adriana Mater, and Only the Sound Remains. Recent projects include new productions of Prokofiev’s The Gambler for the Salzburg Festival and Rameau’s Castor et Pollux for the Paris Opera. In 2025 Sellars directed the premieres of Matthew Aucoin’s Music for New Bodies at Lincoln Center and The Nine Jewelled Deer by composer Sivan Eldar in Arles and Aix-en-Provence, followed by a staging of One Morning Turns into an Eternity, a Mahler/Schoenberg double bill for the Salzburg Festival. 

Sellars has led several arts festivals, including the 1990 and 1993 Los Angeles Festivals and the 2002 Adelaide Arts Festival. In 2006 he was Artistic Director of New Crowned Hope, a festival in Vienna celebrating Mozart’s 250th birth anniversary for which he invited artists from different cultural background to work in the areas of music, theater, dance, film, fine art and architecture. He served as the Music Director of the 2016 Ojai Music Festival in California. Sellars is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA and a curator of the Telluride Film Festival. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Erasmus Prize for contributions to European culture, Gish Prize, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been awarded the prestigious Polar Music Prize and been named Artist of the Year by Musical America. In 2021 Sellars was honored with the EBU-IMZ Lifetime Achievement Award for his body of opera video recordings.