Seeing Anthony Davis's Amistad[1] and Meredith Monk's Atlas[6] as a college student and his time in Berlin led him towards opera.
[8] Sharon serves as co-artistic director of The Industry in Los Angeles, alongside Ash Fure and Malik Gaines.
[2] Notable productions include Hopscotch, an opera staged in 24 moving vehicles;[9] a performance installation of Terry Riley's In C at the Hammer Museum; Christopher Cerrone's Invisible Cities, based on the Italo Calvino novel and staged in Union Station (Los Angeles),[10] Anne LeBaron's Crescent City, set in a mythical town loosely based on New Orleans,[11] Sweet Land, an opera about colonialism and history created in collaboration with Cannupa Hanska Luger, Aja Couchois Duncan, Raven Chacon, Du Yun, and Douglas Kearney;[12] and The Comet/Poppea, a double-feature consisting of L'incoronazione di Poppea and an operatic adaptation of W. E. B.
[13] From 2017–2019, Sharon was the first-ever artist-collaborator at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where his projects included an original setting of Orson Welles's The War of the Worlds with music by Annie Gosfield, performed both inside and outside Walt Disney Concert Hall simultaneously;[14] the installation Nimbus; a new performance edition of Lou Harrison's Young Caesar;[15] a staging of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde with Gustavo Dudamel in Spring 2018;[16] and productions of John Cage's Europeras 1&2 and Meredith Monk's Atlas, for which Sharon became the first-ever outside producer of one of the composer's works.
[32] In 2022, Sharon led the premiere production of Proximity, a trio of new operas commissioned by Lyric Opera of Chicago comprising The Walkers by Daniel Bernard Roumain and Anna Deavere Smith, Four Portraits by Caroline Shaw and Jocelyn Clarke; and Night, composed by John Luther Adams with text by the late John Haines.