Amy Stebbins is a writer and director working across opera, theater, and new media. Her work ranges from mainstage productions to site-specific installations to hybrid forms such as virtual reality and film/orchestra collaborations. Her breakthrough came with Mauerschau (Bavarian State Opera, 2016), which was awarded the Opera Festival Prize and later brought by conductor Oksana Lyniv to the LvivMozArt Festival in Ukraine. Since then, Amy has received commissions from several opera houses, including the Augsburg State Theater, the Neuköllner Oper, and the Frankfurt Opera.

As a director, Amy enjoys working in a wide range of formats. Her recent production, c:\\>title Labyrinth, was staged in the cooling room of the former Augsburg gas plant. Audience members were placed in an immersive setting that combined 3D projection with virtual reality and an orchestra of new instruments in "surround sound" around the perimeter of the space.

As a writer, Amy crafts original stories based on preexisting literary, documentary, and mixed-media materials. Her libretti are known for their surreal narratives, historical analysis, quirky humor, and conceptual rigor. Collaboration is essential to her process, especially in her work with composers. "A libretto is not an autonomous work of art," she has written, "but a communication device between the scenic and the acoustic imaginations of the creative team." Since 2014, she has penned the libretti for seven operas, five of them in collaboration with composer Hauke Berheide.

In the spring of 2025, Amy joined the "Immersive Opera" team at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Headed by Professor Toby Young, this UKRI-funded research project is committed to developing new formats for opera and opera-adjacent experiences in collaboration with several partner institutions across the United Kingdom, Europe, and North America.

Amy's commitment to new work also takes the form of institutional intervention. She is the co-founder and chairperson of New Opera Dialogues, an artist-led NGO that promotes international dialogue about contemporary opera. She has also convened multiple transatlantic exchanges for artists and arts administrators in partnership with the Fulbright Foundation, the German Chancellery, the U.S. State Department, and other institutions.

Amy holds a Ph.D. in Cinema & Media Studies and Germanic Studies from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in History & Literature from Harvard College. Her dissertation, "Theater against the Turn: Acting Dialectics at Frank Castorf's Volksbühne", explores acting in the theater of Frank Castorf and the forms of political ontology it models. Beyond her dissertation, the Berlin Volksbühne was formative for Stebbins. From 2007 to 2010, she interned and assisted artists like René Pollesch, Sebastian Baumgarten, and Chris Kondek.

Amy's other writing and research have appeared in Seminar, Critical Social Policy, The Arts in Psychotherapy, and Zeit-Online, as well as in several anthologies, including Musik in der digitalen Ära (Rombach Wissenschaft, 2024), Theatre and Internationalization (Routledge, 2021) and Das Regiebuch (Wallstein Verlag, 2021).

Much of Amy's artistic work has been developed with the support of residencies and fellowships, including MacDowell, the Academy for Theater & Digitality, the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, the German Chancellor Fellowship, Akademie Musiktheater heute, and the Fulbright Foundation.

Amy lives between Brussels, London, and Chicago.