Ben Krywosz serves as Artistic Director of Nautilus Music- Theater, co-founding it as the New Music-Theater Ensemble in 1986, when it was a program of the Minnesota Opera. Serving as producer-director-dramaturg, his work with Nautilus includes directing world-premiere productions of such works as Twisted Apples, Answered Prayers, Joan of Arc, Reach, Untold Lies, Loss of Breath, Meditations on Arion, Hearts On Fire, Dante’s View, Without Colors, Fly Away All, Fire In The Future, and the revised version of Snow Leopard, as well as new productions of Goblin Market, Into the Woods, The Last Five Years, Man of La Mancha, Carousel, The Diary of Adam and Eve, A Water Bird Talk, Ordinary Days, Orpheus and Euridice, The Fantasticks, Alice Unwrapped, The View From Here, John and Jen, From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, and Songs from an Unmade Bed. His productions for Nautilus have won three Iveys, the Twin Cities awards program for theatrical excellence. He has also produced 199 ROUGH CUTS programs, Nautilus’ monthly series of new operas and other forms of music-theater. He recently dramaturged and staged premiere productions of Stations of the Heart and Moonlit Walk Home, for which he co-write the libretto.
Krywosz has staged full productions for The Minnesota Opera, San Francisco Opera‘s Merola Program, Skylark Opera, Opera Roanoke, California Coast Opera, Midwest Opera Theater, West Bay Opera, Dorian Opera Theater, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and the Lake George Opera‘s Apprentice Program.
His academic work includes teaching at the University of Minnesota, the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, Boston Conservatory, University of Iowa, Grand Valley State University in Michigan, Lawrence University in Wisconsin, and Augsburg University in Minneapolis, conducting master classes and staging productions of Thick as a Brick, Cosi Fan Tutte, Candide, Into The Woods, My Fair Lady, Saturn Returns, and Weird Romance. He has also directed Nautilus’ Wesley Balk Opera/Music-Theater Institute since 1983, teaching classes in integrated singing-acting.
He developed and continues to direct Composer-Librettist Studios around the country, having facilitated over 1,600 collaborations between composers and writers since 1984, including an annual studio at New Dramatists. From 1984 to 1987, Krywosz was Project Director for Opera America’s OPERA FOR THE 80s AND BEYOND program, where he concentrated on introducing the professional opera field to the work of innovative music-theater artists.
Krywosz also serves as a lecturer, group facilitator, community organizer, and administrative consultant, and teaches classes in collaboration for such clients as The Lincoln Center Director’s Lab, the Dramatists Guild, Park Square Theater, Theatre Communications Group, Zeitgeist, and Opera America. He has twice participated in the Shannon Leadership Institute, and was awarded a Leadership Initiative in Neighborhoods Program grant from the Saint Paul Companies to study innovative approaches to non-profit management.