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- Francesca Zambello (born 1956) is a leading American opera and theatre director. Zambello lived in Europe when she was a child, learning to speak French, Italian, German and Russian. Zambello is of Italian descent. She attended Moscow University in 1976 and graduated from Colgate University in 1978. Zambello began her career as an Assistant Director to the celebrated opera directors Jean-Pierre Ponnelle and Nathaniel Merrill. From 1984 to 1991 she was the Artistic Director of the Skylight Opera Theatre in Milwaukee. In recent years she has worked at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Washington National Opera (Wagners Ring, co-produced with the San Francisco Opera), Houston Grand Opera, the Bolshoi, Teatro la Fenice in Venice, the Royal Opera in London and the Paris Opera, as well as for the Seattle Children's Theatre, BBC Television, and the Bregenz Festival. She is an Artistic Advisor to the San Francisco Opera. She has won awards for her work in France, England, Japan, Germany, Russia and Australia. Zambello made her Broadway directorial debut with the musical production of Disney's The Little Mermaid (2008). Zambello directed the regional production of the musical of The First Wives Club at the Old Globe Theatre, San Diego, California in 2009, but left the project because of "prior scheduling commitments". She directed the musical version of Little House on the Prairie, which premiered at the Guthrie Theater in July 2008 and is currently touring the United States. This year Zambello developed a stage version of The Master Butchers Singing Club, the 2003 Louise Erdrich novel, with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Marsha Norman. The production premiered on September 11, 2010, at the Guthrie Theater. On September 1, 2010, Zambello took the reins of the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, New York, as its new general and artistic director. She immediately changed the company's name to Glimmerglass Festival and said that she would present a musical each season, starting with Annie Get Your Gun in the summer of 2011. Prior to the opening of Glimmerglass she will direct Wagner's complete Ring at San Francisco Opera next June. In May 2011, she was announced as artistic advisor to the Washington National Opera, after the departure of former director Placido Domingo .
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