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Christopher Milligan

Christopher Milligan is The Harry Fath General Director and CEO of Cincinnati Opera, the nation’s second-oldest opera company. Appointed in 2020, he leads the company’s strategic and organizational direction, drawing on more than three decades of experience with the institution he first joined as a production intern in 1989.

Milligan’s tenure has included a series of ambitious and wide-ranging productions, among them the world stage premiere of Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio, a new production of Fiddler on the Roof, and Lalovavi, the first opera of the company’s Black Opera Project, which earned a nomination for an International Opera Award. He also guided the company through the pandemic, which began weeks into his tenure, leading its 2021 return to live performance with Summer at Summit, its first open-air season in fifty years.

Before his appointment as CEO, Milligan served as Managing Director from 2010 to 2020, working closely with the board and senior leadership on strategic planning, programming, and organizational management, with oversight of marketing, analytics, public relations, community engagement, education, earned revenue, and patron services. He joined the company full-time in 1997 as Director of Marketing, leading a team that achieved record attendance for numerous productions, including the 2005 Cincinnati premiere of Richard Danielpour and Toni Morrison’s Margaret Garner, which Cincinnati Opera co-commissioned as part of a consortium with Detroit Opera and Opera Philadelphia.

Milligan is widely recognized for his commitment to expanding opera’s reach. He led the creation of signature community initiatives including Opera Idol and The Opera Express, a one-of-a-kind mobile theater housed in a truck that brings opera directly to neighborhoods throughout the region.

Earlier in his career, Milligan was a program director at The Muse Machine in Dayton, Ohio, where he developed arts education workshops, tours, and seminars for hundreds of middle and high school teachers.

Milligan is a 2026 alumnus of the Oxford Cultural Leaders Programme at the University of Oxford, which convenes a select international cohort of senior leaders in arts and culture. He is also an alumnus of Leadership Cincinnati Class 32 and was the inaugural recipient of the Marketer of the Year Award from the Cincinnati Chapter of the American Marketing Association. A graduate of Miami University, he has served on the university’s adjunct faculty and on the College of Creative Arts advisory board.

A native of Kettering, Ohio, Milligan lives in Lebanon, Ohio, with his wife, Molly. They have three daughters, each doing amazing things of her own.