About
Nico Krell is an Uruguayan-born director raised across three continents.
He creates theatrical experiences: plays, musicals, operas, performance art, immersive shows, and, once, a gastrotheatrical adaptation of Medea. He loves working on new plays, musicals, contemporary gems, radical adaptations, and visceral classics.
His work is provocative and socially-conscious, building a forum through formally-inventive, design-forward drama. When he works, the health and honest expression of the creators involved is held above all — he believes in a humane theater.
"He is an extraordinary director, with a painter's sense of composition, color and light, a musician's sense of timing, range, and emotional resonance, and a magician's sense of tension, curiosity, and surprise. His productions are always physically engaging and full of ideas."
Robert N. Sandberg
Professor and Playwright
Louis Sudler Prize Award Ceremony
Recent directing work includes: Joseph Haydn's L'anima del filosofo (U Toronto/McGill), the Drag Opera Extravaganzas Slaylem and The Golden Cock (Heartbeat Opera), Samuel Beckett's Happy Days (wild project), Freeman & Bjarke's Tomorrow (NYPL/Lincoln Center), Martha Epstein's The Things She Held (The Chain), Paula Vogel's The Baltimore Waltz, Arthur Miller's The Crucible (Princeton Summer Theater), and the new musicals Gaucho and Water Play (Princeton University).
Nico is a Lecturer in Theater at Princeton University, where he led a restructuring of the program towards a more holistic and equitable theater culture. He serves as an Associate Artist with Sanguine Theatre and has supported work at Soho Rep., Heartbeat Opera, Opera America, The Civilians and Berkshire Theatre Group.
As assistant to directors Ethan Heard and Lileana Blain-Cruz, Nico contributed dramaturgical research, facilitated creative problem solving, and spearheaded partnerships with major corporations including Earthjustice and Trojan Condoms. These productions include drag opera extravaganzas, digital opera, mega musicals, and world premieres at Berkshire Theatre Group, Heartbeat Opera, Opera America, and Princeton University.
Nico graduated from Princeton University, where he was the first student to create an independent concentration in Performance Studies. In one-on-one relationships with professors, he explored critical theory, cultural anthropology, epistemology, and ethics to better understand the social phenomena of today. His research criticized media representations of graphic violence and posited a working rubric for a generative aesthetic of staged violence. For his undergraduate work, Nico was awarded the Louis Sudler Prize, Princeton's highest honor in the creative arts.
Through the Princeton University Atelier program, Nico was part of a select group of students to collaborate on projects with Jennine Willett of Third Rail Projects, Noah Brody and Ben Steinfeld of Fiasco Theater, Hannah Bos, Oliver Butler, and Paul Thureen of The Debate Society, and John Doyle.
Nico also received the Martin A. Dale Award, a research grant to investigate and practice performance art in the UK, France, and Germany. The project's core was a five-day isolation retreat based on Marina Abramović's training curriculum and monastic practices from around the world. This training informed a series of experimental works, including kinetic sculptures, sound works, disturbances, and happenings.