British stage director Jack Furness is the founder and Artistic Director of Shadwell Opera. He studied music at Cambridge University, where he received a double first-class honours degree. In the 2015-16 season he was an Emerging Artist Director for Scottish Opera and, from there, he was taken up by the Royal Opera House where he assisted directors such as Sir David McVicar, Laurent Pelly, Kasper Holten and Robert Carsen.

This season includes productions of Hansel and Gretel for the Royal Academy of Music, and The Queen of Spades for Garsington Opera. Jack returns to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden as the revival director of Turandot.

Recent directing credits include Candide (Scottish Opera); Aci, Galatea e Polifemo (London Handel Festival), Faust (Irish National Opera), The Snow Maiden (Royal Northern College of Music), Rusalka (Garsington Opera, Edinburgh International Festival); Don Giovanni (Nevill Holt Opera); Gianni Schicchi (Copenhagen Opera Festival); Dido and Aeneas (Royal Academy of Music); revival of David McVicar’s production of Carmen (Dallas Opera); revival of Kasper Holten’s production of Don Giovanni (Royal Opera House, Covent Garden); Così fan tutte, Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni (Teatru Manoel, Malta); Iolanta and Opera Highlights tour (Scottish Opera); The Rape of Lucretia (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland); Written on Skin and Lessons in Love and Violence (Melos Sinfonia in St Petersburg); Kurt Weill’s Down in the Valley and Der Jasager (Opera North Youth Company and Scottish Opera Connect Company at the Aberdeen International Youth Theatre Festival); Amadis de Gaule (University College Opera); Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel (Wexford Festival); Eugene Onegin (Ryedale Festival Opera); Falstaff (Opera Integra); I Found My Horn (Marlowe Society); two short opera films for Shadwell Opera which were broadcast on Channel 4 and watched by over 400,000 people worldwide and a promotional film for Blackheath Community Halls Opera.
For Shadwell Opera, he has directed Oliver Knussen’s Where the Wild Things Are (Alexandra Palace Theatre and Mariinsky Concert Hall, St Petersburg); Albert Herring (Opera Holland Park); Die Zauberflöte, which won a 2009 RBS Herald Angel Award (Edinburgh Fringe Festival); Così fan tutte, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Jonathan Dove’s Siren Song, and In the Penal Colony (Arts Theatre, Leicester Square); Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse and a double bill of Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Mark Anthony Turnage’s Twice through the Heart (Hackney Showroom);Speech Acts – a double-bill of George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill and Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale (Courtyard Theatre); and Song – a double bill of Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King (Bart’s Pathology Museum).