Olivia Gacka is a first-year Pittsburgh Opera Resident Artist in 2026-27. This season, she will assistant stage direct all five of our season operas.

Olivia Gacka is a stage director and dramaturg who has held young artist residencies and apprenticeships at The Glimmerglass Festival, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and Cedar Rapids Opera. Her directing credits include Don Giovanni (Western Plains Opera), Lucidity (Opera Ithaca), The Pirates of Penzance (Opera Theatre of Saint Louis Opera On the Go), L'amant anonyme (Ithaca College), and Proving Up (Opera Steamboat). Equally at home with concert work, Olivia has enjoyed opportunities to direct concert stagings of operas such as The Tongue and the Lash (Opera Theatre of Saint Louis) as well as scene work for concerts, recitals, and cabarets. Olivia has also directed new plays for festivals such as St. Louis Shakespeare Festival's Confluence New Play Festival and StageQ's CapitalQ Theatre Festival.

As an assistant director, Olivia has worked on both original stagings and remounted productions with companies including Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Minnesota Opera, Opera Omaha, Theatre Memphis, and Cedar Rapids Opera. A strong advocate for the dramatic influence and importance of supertitles, Olivia has served as the English Supertitles Designer for Opera Theatre of Saint Louis' festival seasons since 2025. As a dramaturg, Olivia's work has included collaborations in opera, musicals, and plays, and some of her dramaturgical writing can be found on the Glimmerglass Festival website from their 50th season. 

In addition to her work for the stage, Olivia is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies with a doctoral minor in Arts Administration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her dissertation in progress is entitled “‘One Night Only’: The art of the Tony Awards as an adaptive cultural media ritual.” Her broader research interests also include contemporary & historical Irish theatre, musical theatre, and archive, and her scholarship has been published in the James Joyce Quarterly and the New Hibernia Review. She holds a B.A. in Sociology and Theatre from Rhodes College, and an M.A. in Irish Theatre History and Archives from the University of Galway.

Ms. Gacka's residency is generously sponsored by John Battaglia,The Bernadette G. Callery Endowed Fund for Resident Artists, and Steven Seibert.