Peter Sellars (born September 27, 1957) is an American theatre director, noted for his unique stagings of classical and contemporary operas and plays.

In the winter of 1980, Sellars's production of George Frideric Handel's Orlando, again at the American Repertory Theatre, was set in outer space.

His productions included Pericles, Prince of Tyre and a staging of The Lighthouse, with music by British composer Peter Maxwell Davies.

"[9] In 1984, Sellars was named director and manager of the American National Theater at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. at the age of 26; he held this post until 1986.

During his time in Washington, Sellars staged a production of The Count of Monte Cristo, in a version by James O'Neill, featuring Richard Thomas, Patti LuPone, and Zakes Mokae.

The productions were recorded in Austria by ORF in 1989, subsequently televised by PBS, and later revived at the MC93 Bobigny in Paris and the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona.

The Salzburg and Glyndebourne Festivals invited Sellars to produce operas, including Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise, Paul Hindemith's Mathis der Maler, György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre, John Adams's and Alice Goodman's Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, and Kaija Saariaho's L'amour de loin.

[18] Sellars also staged Handel's opera Giulio Cesare and oratorio Theodora, and Stravinsky's A Soldier's Tale, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, in addition to I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky and The Peony Pavilion.

He directed the premieres of Saariaho's oratorio La Passion de Simone and Adams's opera A Flowering Tree, also in Vienna.

He introduced the screenings of Mahamat Saleh Haroun's Daratt and Garin Nugroho's Opera Jawa, two of the New Crowned Hope films.

The festival also screened Jon Else's documentary, Wonders Are Many, which features an account of Adams's and Sellars's creation of the first San Francisco production of Doctor Atomic.

[34] In 2005, Sellars was awarded The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, given annually to "a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind's enjoyment and understanding of life.

We learn through Sellars that they never did satisfy us, not just because their silly conventions leave Mozart untouched but also because they protect the laziness and incompetence of most opera companies."

In 1996, Said characterized Sellars's Covent Garden staging of Hindemith's Mathis der Maler as "compelling and brilliant in conception" and "deliberately uncompromising in its appeal to a late-twentieth-century audience".