Rosalind Parker

Rosalind Parker is an opera director

She works with interdisciplinarity, and alongside her current projects is pursuing the following

lines of enquiry. .

Beyond the trigger; audience psychology in the theatre

Exploring the practice of directing ‘triggering material’; creative work in conversation with psychological research, therapists and psychiatrists. Implications for performing and receiving bodies as we stage the unstageable.

This project began in relation to directing Returns by composer James Cave, an operatic study in PTSD through conscientious objector Iraqi-war veteran Joshua Casteel's experience in Abu Ghraib, workshopped and performed in York Minster.

This is a multi-disciplinary project funded by CRASSH, Cambridge Research for Arts Social Sciences and Humanities, with Dr Ian Burrows, Tragedy, English Literature, Cambridge, and Prof Femi Oyebode, Psychiatry, Birmingham.

Acoustically led approaches to site-specific opera

Site-specific performance: opera beyond the concert hall, opera without the orchestral pit. Discovering a sound-led approach using Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire in the Grade II Edwardian Bath-house, Moseley Road Baths.

The School of Early Reflections, directorial - acoustic - scenographic partnership with Pedro Novo, Acoustic Engineer, Max Fordham, Leanne Vandenbussche, Scenographer Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, and Composer Architect Dr Emma-Kate Matthews, Bartlett Architecture, UCL.

Recently published; Routledge Companion to Sound of Space, 2025

Religion in public space; aesthetics and interfaith

Rosalind was invited to create the Alma Royalton Kisch post for arts and inter-faith for the Cambridge Interfaith Programme as a result of her MPhil in British Muslim Identity post 7/7.

She was director of productions for Ulfah Arts and Media, muslim women’s social enterprise (UK, Kosovo) and was the founding Arts voice on the European Network on Religion and Belief .

Through her work she offers conversation with religious praxis, interfaith dialogue, and British Muslim relations post-9/11. Her book Religion and Aesthetics’ invites this dialogue further into the space of theological implication, including for the Duke Cambridge Divinity Exchange: Theology, Modernity and the Arts.

Community co-creation and sustainability

Sustainably led approaches to production in conversation with ACE Environmental Responsibility, and published as case study of best practice in Climate and Theatre, Bloomsbury 2026.

She is Creative Director of SZCreative, and Director of CIC Creative, this began from a Noye’s Fludde, Benjamin Britten, Thorington Theatre 2024, developed with the community, co-created with young people and those of all ages, and created on principles of sustainability, involving local prisons, farming, construction and engineering.

For financial as well as environmental reasons; this is a call to establish a much needed language, that as an art form we are behind on.

The model of workshop based, sustainably-led community praxis was franchised into a new company which continues to grow

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Rosalind Parker is a practitioner and researcher who works as a Director, mainly in opera, but also across theatre and curation.

She is excited by texts encountering audiences

In opera she has worked at Glyndebourne, Opera North, Welsh National Opera, ROH Linbury, RFH Southbank, Britten Pears Arts, The Other Palace Victoria, Teatro Sao Carlos Lisbon and Porto.

She has Directed for ICA London, LaMama NYC, worked as Assistant Director for Complicite, curated with Tracey Emin and lived and worked with the Jana Sanskriti Theatre of the Oppressed, Kolkata.

At the forefront of her practice is the importance of sustainability, new audiences and engaging communities with cultural spaces and classic text.

As Creative Director of SZCreative, currently transitioning into a regional CIC movement, she explores process-based work across professional, community and environmental sectors. From 2023 she has been developing a model of opera making which uses co-creation and partnership: aiming to create new pathways into large-scale performances and aesthetic spaces of felt ownership - for both audience and performer.

Whilst her creative work is not ‘practice-research’, where possible she harnesses her praxis into interdisciplinary contexts to explore research issues whilst developing the dramaturgical language of new operas.