Timothy O'Leary General Director
Timothy O’Leary has been General Director of Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center since 2018. O'Leary is responsible for leading the WNO staff, collaborating with acclaimed Artistic Director Francesca Zambello and the company’s Board of Trustees to achieve WNO’s goals for artistic excellence, community impact, and financial strength. O’Leary also collaborates with leadership of the Kennedy Center to fulfill its mission as the National Cultural Center.
O’Leary served as board chair of OPERA America, the national service organization for opera, from 2016 to 2021, and served previously as its treasurer. He currently serves on the board of the Denyce Graves Foundation, which promotes equity and inclusion in American classical vocal arts.
O’Leary created the WNO Fund for Innovation and Excellence in 2019 to support WNO’s mission to shape the future of opera and its vision to contribute to a stronger civic fabric through “artistic citizenship.” The fund has resulted in growth of 32 percent to WNO’s annual fundraising since 2018. At the same time, WNO’s endowment has grown by nearly 90 percent since 2018 to reach nearly $16 million. This progress was facilitated by WNO’s strategic plan, which O’Leary developed with the WNO Board in 2019, focused on artistic excellence as well as audience growth, audience diversity, and audience experience. Strategies to attract and retain new audiences and support an experience of belonging at WNO performances and events have led to high levels of attendance at recent WNO seasons, including sellouts for many WNO productions, as well as increasing subscription rates, building back from pandemic-era levels. WNO audiences have also become younger and more diverse, with record percentages of new audiences attending.
Together with Zambello, O’Leary has overseen WNO artistic milestones including the sold-out premiere of an acclaimed new production of Puccini’s unfinished opera Turandot, with an original ending written by Christopher Tin and Susan Soon He Stanton, commissioned by WNO; the world premiere of Grounded by Jeanine Tesori and George Brant; the D.C. premiere of Jeanine Tesori and Tazewell Thompson’s Blue; and the world premiere of Written in Stone, created for the Kennedy Center’s 50th anniversary, by Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran, Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang, Kamala Sankaram and A.M. Homes, and Carlos Simon and Marc Bamuthi Joseph.
Prior to joining WNO, O’Leary served for 10 years as General Director for Opera Theater of Saint Louis (OTSL). Under his direction, OTSL earned acclaim for innovative programming, growth in new and diverse audiences, community engagement, and financial growth. During his tenure, the OTSL endowment increased by 111 percent, from $16.5 million to nearly $35 million, while the company also achieved records for annual fundraising, event fundraising, corporate sponsorship, and acquisition of new donors.
During the same period, OTSL created an Innovation Capital Fund to support the launch of its New Works, Bold Voices commissioning program, a cycle of world-premiere American operas that tell diverse stories of the modern era. Together with OTSL Artistic Director James Robinson, O’Leary commissioned Terence Blanchard’s first two operas, Champion and Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which have since been widely performed, making history as the first works written by a Black composer to enter the repertory of the Metropolitan Opera. Commissions and premieres also included works by Ricky Ian Gordon and Royce Vavrek, Jack Perla and Rajiv Joseph, and Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang.
O’Leary’s tenure St. Louis was recognized for growth in diverse Generation X and millennial audiences through the creation of OTSL’s Engagement and Inclusion Task Force and a Young Friends program, which quadrupled in subscribership during his leadership. OTSL’s community engagement work ranged from a collaboration with civic leaders to establish an annual interfaith September 11 concert to a multi-partner concert to raise scholarship funds for students in Ferguson, Missouri, following the killing of Michael Brown. For its work, OTSL was recognized with numerous awards as well as grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and The Wallace Foundation, and O’Leary received the St. Louis Business Journal “Innovation Award,” the Norman A. Stack Community Relations Award from the St. Louis Jewish Community Relations Council, an honorary doctorate from Eden Theological Seminary, as well as the “St. Louis Superhero” award from Metro Theater Company.
O’Leary’s training included an apprenticeship with San Francisco Opera’s Merola Program, graduate studies in Theater Management at Columbia University, a degree in English from Dartmouth College, an internship with Lincoln Center Festival, and executive education at the business schools of the University of Michigan and Harvard University. Early in his career, O’Leary was part of the management team at New York City Opera under General and Artistic Director Paul Kellogg. As an assistant stage director, he worked for the New York City Opera, Glimmerglass Opera, Florida Grand Opera, and others. O’Leary lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife Kara, a clinical psychologist, and their three children.