Nancy Ellison has received high recognition for her work as author, producer and photographer with exhibitions at the Metropolitan Opera House, Sotheby’s New York, and the Mary Boone Gallery.  Her Broadway credits as producer include several award-winning plays such as Thurgood (2008), The Country Girl (2008), The Seafarer (2008), and Inherit the Wind (2007). Ellison’s photography has been praised for combining visual narrative with in - depth historical material in order to capture the Gesamtkunstwerk. As a philanthropic supporter in the cultural arena, Ellison serves on the boards of the American Ballet Theatre and the National Trust for the Humanities. She was also the director of the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts. Nancy Ellison has published widely and is the author of In Grand Style: The Glory of the Metropolitan Opera (Rizzoli, 2006) and In Classic Style: The Splendor of American Ballet Theatre (Rizzoli 2008).

At a dress rehearsal of the Metropolitan Opera’s final production of Der Ring des Nibelungen directed by Otto Schenk, photographer and producer Nancy Ellison took over ten thousand photographs. The resulting book Wagner’s Eternal Ring (Rizzoli, September 2010) offers a visual progression that leads readers through the complete narrative of each music drama in the Ring cycle. In her talk, Nancy Ellison will discuss the various influences on Wagner’s visual aesthetics, such as nineteenth-century German landscape painting, as well as various written sources like Heinrich Porges’s account of the stage rehearsals of the first Bayreuth Festival and Richard Wagner’s own stage directions. By creating an affinity between the Schenk Ring and Wagner’s emotional and aesthetic world at the time he wrote it – and by concentrating on the story and the dramatic intent of the actors – Nancy Ellison will give a complete visual narrative of the Ring and its significance in the history of opera production.