Wendy Steiner

Wendy Steiner is the librettist of four operas with composer Paul Richards, two premiering in 2022:  Mondo Novo, in the Vienna Summer Music Festival; and A Braided Light, commissioned by White Snake Projects in Boston.  Now a fulltime interdisciplinary artist, Steiner spent her academic career as the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and Founding Director of the Penn Humanities Forum.  She is author or editor of fourteen books on aesthetics and cultural criticism, including The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (NY Times “100 Best Books of 1996”); Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (2001); and The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art (2010).  A Guggenheim, ACLS, Bellagio, and NEH Fellow, Steiner co-designed Traces on the Farther Side with Andrew Lucia, a “digital visualization” of music by Frances White selected for the 2019 Venice Biennale.  She was awarded a NYSCA individual artist’s grant for her photography-opera-hologram installation in the 2022 Venice Biennale, Upon Reflection: An Opera in Ten Images.  Steiner lives in New York, where she is at work on a new book, “The Beauty of Choice: Aesthetics and the Agency of Women.”