Per Boye Hansen

From April 2012 to July 2017, he held the post of Artistic Director of The Norwegian National Opera, which during his tenure rose to become a prominent opera company and enjoys great international acclaim. In 2015, it received in London the International Opera Award in the “Accessibility” category. Between 2005 and 2012, he served as the director of the Bergen International Festival. In 2000, he began working as casting director at the Komische Oper Berlin, where in 2003 he was named director of Opera, a position he held until 2005.

In 2011, the Norwegian Minister of Culture appointed him chair of the jury of the International Ibsen Award. Hansen sat on the juries in several international competitions for opera singers and stage directors.

From 1984 to 1988, Hansen worked as assistant stage director at the Oper Köln, and was for several summers working as assistant director at the Salzburg Festival.  After theatre studies at the University of Oslo, he went on to study opera direction under the tutelage of Prof Dieter Bülter-Marell at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, Germany, where he graduated in 1982 staging a production of Purcells opera «Dido and Aeneas».

In the same year he established the Oslo Summer Opera company, which he helmed until 1992 which turned into an annual 10-day festival with concerts and opera performances. In frame of the festival Hansen staged the Norwegian premiere Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mozart’s Don Giovanni,  Così fan tutte and La clemenza di Tito, and Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos.