David J. Levin is the Addie Clark Harding Professor in Germanic Studies, Cinema and Media Studies and Chair of the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago, where he also serves as Senior Advisor to the Provost for Arts.
From 2011-2016 he served as the founding director of the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, which fosters experimental collaborations between artists and scholars. Levin has served as a guest professor of theater and performance studies at the Free University of Berlin as well as the Universities of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Mainz, and Konstanz. In 2015, Levin was appointed as an adjunct professor of the aesthetics of musical performance at the University of Oslo. He teaches an annual seminar at the Norwegian National Opera for an interdisciplinary group of graduate and undergraduate students on the interpretation of opera stagings. From 2005-2015, he served as executive editor of the Opera Quarterly, published by Oxford University Press. He is the editor of Opera Through Other Eyes (Stanford, 1994) and the author of Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal (Princeton, 1998) and Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky (Chicago, 2007).
In addition to his academic work, Levin has worked as a dramaturg and collaborator for various opera houses in Germany and the United States as well for the choreographers William Forsythe and Saar Magal.