Bio

Born in Greenville, South Carolina, Stephen Karr is a compelling interpreter of opera and orchestral works, and is in demand as a conductor and keyboardist. He is in his third season as Music Director for Opera at the University of Memphis, where he led the inaugural production in the new Scheidt Family Performing Arts Center in Spring 2023, Puccini’s La bohème. He also debuted with Opera Memphis and the Memphis Symphony Orchestra with Zach Redler’s The Falling and the Rising in his first season in Memphis.

Before moving to Memphis, he was Associate Conductor and Artistic Administrator at Long Beach Opera from 2018-2021, where he was scheduled to conduct Robert X. Rodriguez’s Frida and Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse, both productions which were cancelled by the COVID-19 pandemic. Conducting Frida, he made his debut with Anchorage Opera in Alaska in February 2020. In 2011, he co-founded Pacific Opera Project, for which he was music director until 2016. With POP, he led productions of Trouble in Tahiti, Così fan tutte, The Turn of the Screw, La Calisto (LA premiere), Ariadne auf Naxos and The Rake’s Progress (LA professional premiere), among others. The LA Times praised his performance of the Stravinsky as having kept orchestra, cast and chorus on “well-articulated rhythmic track.” He has worked as the music director for the OPERA Iowa tour, and been on music staff with the Glimmerglass Festival, Opera New Jersey and Palm Beach Opera. Karr has taught at Chapman University, Michigan State University, USC and UCLA.

His schooling includes degrees in organ (Mercer University and Westminster Choir College) and orchestral conducting (UCLA). He lives in Midtown Memphis with his wife, Hannah Waldman, and their children Leonard and Eleanor.