Arthur Fagen is Music Director of The Atlanta Opera and Professor of Music in instrumental conducting at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington. In addition, he is in demand as a guest conductor of symphony orchestras and opera companies throughout the world.

Mr. Fagen has conducted productions at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Metropolitan Opera, Bavarian State Opera (Munich), Deutsche Oper Berlin, Staatsoper Berlin, New York City Opera, Theatre Capitole de Toulouse, Bordeaux Opera, Frankfurt Opera, Staatstheater Stuttgart, New Israeli Opera, Baltimore Opera, Edmonton Opera, Spoleto Festival, Teatro Colon Buenos Aires, Teatro Lirico di Cagliari, Stadttheater Bozen. From 1998 to 2001, he was a regular guest conductor at the Vienna State Opera. On the concert podium, he has appeared with internationally known orchestras including the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie, the Czech Philharmonic, Munich Radio Orchestra, Tokyo Philharmonic, RAI Orchestras (Torino, Naples, Milano, Roma), the Bergen Philharmonic, Prague Spring Festival, the Dutch Radio Orchestra, Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, to name but a few. Mr. Fagen has an opera repertory of more than 75 works. He has served as Principal Conductor in Kassel and Brunswick, as Chief Conductor of the Flanders Opera of Antwerp and Ghent, as Music Director of the Queens Symphony Orchestra and a member of the conducting staff of the Lyric Opera of Chicago. From 2002 through 2007, Mr. Fagen was the Music Director of the Dortmund Philharmonic Orchestra and the Dortmund Opera. Following successful concerts with the Dortmund Philharmonic at the Grosse Festspielhaus in Salzburg, Arthur Fagen and the Dortmund Philharmonic were invited to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Palais de Beaux Arts in Brussels, and in Salzburg, Beijing and Shanghai. He conducted in that period, among others, new opera productions of Siegfried, Götterdämmerung and two complete “Ring” cycles.

Mr. Fagen conducted a new production of Turandot at the Atlanta Opera in 2007, opening the season with enormous success and inaugurating their new home at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center. He returned to Atlanta to conduct Cold Sassy Tree by Carlisle Floyd plus productions of Akhnaten by Philip Glass, Der Fliegende Holländer, and Die Zauberflöte prior to being named its Music Director. Recent productions for the company includ Tosca, Turandot, Faust, Madama Butterfly, The Abduction from the Seraglio, Le Nozze di Figaro and Der Fliegende Holländer, and Carmen.. This season (2021-22), he will conduct Il Barbiere di Siviglia for the company.

In recent seasons, he has conducted the Israel Symphony Orchestra, Holland Sinfonia, Buenos Aires Philharmonic, Dortmunder Philharmoniker, NDR Hannover in Braunschweig and at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, the Winterthur Orchestra in Switzerland, and Rome's Symphony Orchestras, Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Opera de Nice, concerts in Spain (Las Palmas, Navarra) and in Taiwan. A CD for Naxos was released in October 2007, Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies with the Staatskapelle Weimar plus the world premiere of Alice nel Paese delle Meraviglie for the Teatro Massimo Palermo.

Arthur Fagen was first prizewinner of the "Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Conductors Competition" as well as prizewinner of the "Gino Marinuzzi International Conductors' Competition" in Italy.

Born in New York, Mr. Fagen began his conducting studies with Laszlo Halasz. Further studies continued at the Curtis Institute under the guidance of Max Rudolf, and both at the Salzburg Mozarteum and with Hans Swarowsky. He also served as assistant of Christoph von Dohnanyi (Frankfurt Opera) and James Levine (Metropolitan Opera),