We are excited to announce the upcoming vacancy of Director of Strategy & Commercial. Committed to producing high quality work that informs, excites and entertains, Opera North is looking for someone with big ideas and bold ambition who can spot gaps and bring to bear a strategy which balances commerciality with artistry.
Hi, I’m Laura Canning, General Director and CEO of Opera North. I’m really excited about this new position we’ve created here, and I really hope you’ll want to join us.
Opera North is an amazing company, defining what it means to be an opera company in the 21st century. We tell stories on stage of immense passion and high emotion, but the off-stage stories are just as compelling – be that working with over 3000 children in local schools every week, putting our youth company front and centre in our main stage season, or developing extraordinary cross-cultural collaborations.
We are one of the few opera companies in the country to have maintained a full-time professional chorus and orchestra – they are our lifeblood and our route to the future. Add to that a phenomenal body of full-time technicians, stage managers, and costume artisans, let alone the dedicated teams in marketing, development, planning, and so many other areas, and you have an amazing ecosystem of huge breadth and possibility.
This new role at the heart of the senior leadership team will provide an exciting opportunity to help ensure our strength for the future, our importance to the ecology of opera and indeed to the whole of the performing arts and the wider economy of the UK. If you are hungry to create new opportunities, an unusual, curious thinker and a strong team player, able to be persuasive and passionate about what Opera North is doing, I really hope you will apply.
Laura Canning
General Director and CEO, Opera North
The Orchestra of Opera North in concert
For more information about the role and to apply, please speak to our executive search partners GatenbySanderson by clicking below.
Salary: circa £70,000 per annum
Deadline for applications: 4th July 2025
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Policy
Opera North is England’s national opera company in the North and a leading European arts organisation. Acclaimed for its imaginative programming and innovative productions on the main stage, Opera North also programmes its own venue, the Howard Assembly Room, with an enormous diversity of activity.
Opera North strives to make opera vital. All 270 employees, along with many hundred freelancers each year, do this by ensuring great opera productions are accessible to as many people as possible, and by providing excellent participatory and learning work for all, to enable others to develop a passion for this incredible art-form.
Extraordinary experiences
We will define what it means to be an opera company for the 21st century. Continually innovating across artforms, we will embrace the diversity of skills and artforms inherent in opera, to make bold and ambitious new work, shared in new ways. Opera is a radical, all-encompassing artform, and we will keep that sense of energy and experimentation at the heart of our work as we explore different avenues in theatre, music, education and beyond.
For everyone
We create work for everyone and will champion diversity in artists, repertoire and audiences. Opera’s power is built on the diversity of the artforms it combines. We will challenge ourselves to ensure the artists and staff we train and work with, repertoire we commission and programme, and audiences or communities we engage are increasingly diverse.
Connect with communities
We work in communities with whom we make a deep, relevant and valuable connection. We are a company of the North with the scale, artistic resource and reputation to redefine our region economically, culturally and socially. Across all our activity, from main stage to education, we will make tangible, real connections with individuals, community groups, schools and businesses.
Make an impact
We will advocate for the value of culture. We believe culture enriches society and empowers people of all backgrounds and ages. We have a significant contribution to make and will collaborate with our peers to demonstrate the impact and value of opera and the creative industries.
Shape the future
We must secure the future. We are on a journey of significant change, on which we will reinvigorate the impact and perception of opera’s relevance and variety, reaching new audiences in new ways and making a positive societal impact across our region and beyond. We will reach more young people, fostering a diverse base of future audiences, singers and musicians. To ensure financial security, we will become more entrepreneurial in seeking out earned income and public, corporate or philanthropic support. We will evolve our business in response to a changing world, ensuring we have the resource and capacity to meet our ambitions.
The Orchestra of Opera North is the only opera orchestra which also has a full symphonic concert programme.
Discover more about our core vocal ensemble, the Chorus of Opera North.
