About

Michael Rau is a director and theater-maker working across live performance, technology, and research. His practice moves among theater, opera, devised performance, and computational and interactive forms, asking how audiences encounter stories, systems, and one another.

He is an Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University, affiliate faculty at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and Artistic Director of Wolf 359. Across these roles, he develops performances and research that bring artists into sustained conversation with emerging technologies.

His work ranges from intimate, audience-responsive experiences to large-scale theater and opera. He specializes in new plays, opera, and digital media projects, and has directed internationally in Germany, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Ireland, Denmark, Mexico, Canada, Australia, and the Czech Republic. In New York City, he has created work at Lincoln Center, The Public Theater, PS122, HERE Arts Center, Ars Nova, The Bushwick Starr, The Brick, 59E59, and Dixon Place. Regionally, his work has been seen at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, and the Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville.

His collaborations with composer Kate Soper have been performed at the Seattle Symphony, the New York Festival of Song, and the New York Philharmonic. He has developed new plays at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Playwrights Realm, and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. His production of temping was selected by The Guardian and The Telegraph as one of the best productions of the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and the piece has been featured twice in The New York Times.

Recent recognition includes the 2026 ATHE–ASTR Excellence in Digital Performance and Scholarship Award for MIME, a Stanford Creative Futures Fellowship, a 2021 Artists + Machine Intelligence Research Award from Google, and a Digital Theater Fellowship at the Akademie für Theater und Digitalität. He has also received fellowships from the Kennedy Center and the National New Play Network, and has been a resident artist at the Orchard Project, E|MERGE, and the Tribeca Performing Arts Center.

Rau is a Forward/Story fellow and has spoken at Books in Browsers, Performing Robots, and StoryCode. He has served as an assistant director for Francesca Zambello, John Turturro, and Robert Woodruff, and as an associate director for Anne Bogart, Les Waters, and Ivo van Hove. He is a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect and a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab.