Karen Kamensek

Karen Kamensek, born in Chicago, is much sought-after opera and concert conductor who frequently appears at major opera houses around the world. She is a specialist in contemporary music and regularly works with the American composer Philip Glass and conducted the world premieres of Glass’s Les Enfants Terribles (Spoleto Festival USA) and Passages in collaboration with Anoushka Shankar which marked her BBC Proms debut. In recent years, Kamensek has also made Glass’s opera Akhnaten a core part of her repertoire and was honoured with a Grammy Award for her recorded performance of the work at the Metropolitan Opera in 2019. 

Recent engagements: Conductor Wonderful Town (Norwegian National Opera), Akhnaten (English National Opera), Don Giovanni (Minnesota Opera), Rigoletto and Akhnaten (Metropolitan Opera), Die Zauberflöte (Lyric Opera of Chicago), Alice (Opera National du Rhin), Così fan tutte (Arizona Opera)