After ten years as artistic and executive director of the Teatro Nacional Sucre in Quito, Ecuador (2009-2019), stage director and composer Chía Patiño has returned to the United States, where we will now find her as a stage director and professor at the renowned University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

In her versatile career we will find her as a stage director of various operas, among which the most recent projects stand out: The Daughter of the Regiment for Opera Colorado, La Traviata for Florida Grand Opera, Suite Española 1 and 2 for Houston Grand Opera, Orpheus & Eurydice for Seattle Opera, and Florencia en el Amazonas in Spain for Opera Tenerife. Her commitment to new works we will find her directing Ñomongetá by Diego Sánchez Haase in New York and Washington (the only opera in Guaraní) as well as the workshop of Paradiso, with music by Yevgeny Sharlat and libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann. Next summer she will direct the world premiere of The House on Mango Street with music by Derek Bermell and libretto by Sandra Cisneros at the Glimmerglass Festival as well as The Turn of the Screw by Benjamin Britten.

In Ecuador she conducted Dido & Aeneas, Carmen, Manuela and Bolivar, Luisa Fernanda, Faust, and The Magic Flute of the Andres as well as the musicals Spring Awakening, West Side Story, and Sweeney Todd. As musical director she directed the Opera Mariachi Cruzar la Cara de la Luna with performances in Houston, Paris, Chicago, Forth Worth, Phoenix, San Diego, Tucson, El Paso, and Quito. As a composer her most recent work was the music for Guadual, the first Ecuadorian circus, a work presented with success in Latin America and Barcelona as well as a song cycle for the young tenor from Guayaquil César Parreño.