Director Christof Loy makes his LA Opera debut with Il Turco in Italia in 2011. He studied directing at the Folkwang Hochschule in his home town of Essen as well as philosophy, art history and Italian philology in Munich.

He has been working as a freelance director for music theater and drama since 1990. His career started in Stuttgart with stagings of, among others, Die Zauberflöte, Children of the Sun, Phaedra and Triumph of Love, as well as Die Entführung aus dem Serail in Freiburg and Patrick Marber's Hautnah at the Kammerspiele in Munich.

Since 1997, Mr. Loy has been working closely with the Deutsche Oper am Rhein Düsseldorf-Duisburg (Manon, Don Carlos, Les Contes d'Hoffmann, a Monteverdi cycle, Les Troyens, La Belle Hélène), the Bremen Theatre (Orphée, Damnation de Faust, The Queen of Spades), and since 1998 with the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels (Le Nozze di Figaro, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Eugene Onegin, Der Rosenkavalier, La Bohème). He is a regular guest at the Hamburg State Opera (Alcina, Il Turco in Italia), the Bavarian State Opera in Munich (Saul, Roberto Devereux, The Bassarids) and the Frankfurt Opera (Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Faust, La Clemenza di Tito, La Finta Semplice, Simon Boccanegra, Così fan tutte). He has staged productions at the Glyndbourne Festival (Iphigénie en Aulide), the Salzburg Festival (Armida), the Royal Opera House Covent Garden (Ariadne auf Naxos, Lucia di Lammermoor), the Gothenburg Opera (Arabella), Royal Opera Copenhagen (Lucio Silla) and Vienna's Theater an der Wien (Giulio Cesare).

Christof Loy was awarded the "Musikpreis der Stadt Duisburg" in 2001, and for his London staging of Ariadne auf Naxos he was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award. In 2003 and 2004 he was named Director of the Year by the critics of the periodical Opernwelt. In the near future, his opera engagements will take him to the Bavarian State Opera (Lucrezia Borgia), Deutsche Oper am Rhein Duisburg (Louise) and Düsseldorf (L'Incoronazione di Poppea), to Covent Garden London (Lulu and Tristan und Isolde), Theater an der Wien (Intermezzo and Prinz von Homburg), Salzburg Festival (Theodora), Stockholm (Ballo in maschera), Amsterdam (Les Vêpres siciliennes), Gothenburg (Rusalka) as well as to Madrid and Milan (Rosenkavalier).

Christof Loy has been a Professor and Head of the Department of Stage Directing at the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst Frankfurt since 2006.