Karen Kamensek is making her mainstage HGO debut. Previously for the company, she served as assistant conductor on Four Saints in Three Acts (1996). Engagements for the 2024-25 season include Poul Ruders’s The Handmaid’s Tale at San Francisco Opera, Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick at the Metropolitan Opera, and Candide at Semperoper Dresden. During the 2023-24 season, Kamensek made several important debuts, from Tosca with London’s Royal Ballet and Opera to the world premiere of Adam Schoenberg’s Cool Cat with the Los Angeles Philharmonic to Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Seattle Symphony. Recent opera highlights include her performances with the English National Opera in Glass's Akhnaten and Satyagraha; Welsh National Opera in Heggie’s Dead Man Walking and Candide; the Metropolitan Opera in Rigoletto; the Lyric Opera of Chicago in The Magic Flute; and the Royal Swedish Opera leading Victoria Borisova-Ollas’s Dracula. Her most recent debuts include the world premiere of the Philip Glass ballet Alice with Opéra National du Rhin and Wonderful Town with the Norwegian Opera & Ballet. Kamensek served as the Music Director of the State Opera of Hannover from 2011-16 and Associate Music Director at the Hamburg State Opera from 2008-11. She won the Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording for her work with the Metropolitan Opera on Philip Glass’s Akhnaten in 2022.