Laine Rettmer is a visual artist and opera director. Their work explores performance, gender, desire and methods of social control and has been presented nationally and internationally at the Vizcaya Museum, Manifesta, MoMA Public, the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Museum, the Illuminus Festival, the Boston Independent Film Festival, the Yuan Art Museum, Yve Yang Gallery, Perkins and Ping, Present Company, NADA NY, NADA Presents and AREA gallery, among others. Rettmer’s opera productions have been praised as “wickedly smart” and “devastatingly funny” by The New York Times and “not only profound but also shattering” by the Observer. Their Barber of Seville was named one of the top 10 classical music productions of 2014 by The New York Times and La Bohème one of the best operas of the decade by the Observer. Rettmer currently serves on the Artistic Advisory Board of On-Site Opera. Rettmer has also worked extensively on new opera with such companies as New York City Opera, Ecce Ensemble, Guerrilla Opera and Fresh Squeezed Opera. Recent awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and an MAP Fund grant for the collaborative opera Standby Snow: Chronicles of a Heat Wave, an Art Alliance Fellowship from HFBK Hamburg, a research fellowship from the Center for Arts Design and Social Research and residences at Skaftfell Center for Visual Arts in Iceland, the Watermill Foundation on Long Island, and MassArt’s Brant Gallery. In addition to teaching in the Sculpture department at RISD, Rettmer has served as a residential scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a part-time lecturer at Northeastern University, and they were a post-graduate fellow at Tufts University. They hold a BFA in stage direction from New York University and an MFA in digital media from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts.