Thomas de Mallet Burgess

In October 2022 Burgess was selected as the new Artistic Director of Finnish National Opera, taking up the position on 1 August 2023.

In July 2018 Burgess was appointed General Director of New Zealand Opera, succeeding Stuart Maunder. The company was in financial difficulties and needed to rebuild its relationship with sponsors and funding agencies. One of Burgess's tasks was to respond to a 2015 review of the company and create a new strategic direction. This involved producing smaller-scale operas in unconventional spaces, such as Wellington and Auckland productions of Eight Songs for a Mad King staged in a corporate boardroom with an audience both inside and outside, the latter listening via headphones. As part of the new strategic direction, Burgess commissioned a comic opera based on the saga of the "unruly tourists", a group of British travellers who were the focus of a New Zealand media frenzy in the summer of 2019. The novel production attracted much media attention and controversy, and a six-part Stuff documentary series, Unruly, was commissioned to follow the course of the production. In 2021 Three New Zealand Opera board members resigned, stating concerns about New Zealand Opera's general artistic direction, and the staging of new operas at the expense of the standard repertoire. Burgess stated that "opera as a global form must be supporting the writing of new operas if the art form is to remain relevant to time and place."

In 2012 Burgess moved to Perth, Australia, with his wife, Perth-raised soprano Fiona McAndrew, with the aim of setting up his own opera company. In 2013 with conductor and musical director Christopher van Tuinen he founded Lost & Found, a company which rediscovered lost operas and performed them in unconventional spaces, and for five years was its Artistic Director. At the same time he was Coordinator of Cultural Services for the City of Joondalup, where he gained experience in arts administration and directed the Joondalup Festival.

He has been a visiting professor and guest director at several music academies and conservatories, including the Royal Academy of Music, California State University, Fresno, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. In 2000–2004 he was Visiting Professor of Opera at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.

Burgess grew up in Barnstaple, North Devon, where he was involved with amateur theatre. He was educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he studied Philosophy and Modern Languages, graduating with a BA and MA. While a student he was an extra in the 1984 film Oxford Blues.

Thomas de Mallet Burgess (born 1964) is a theatre, musical theatre, and opera director from the United Kingdom. He was Creative Director at Wexford Opera House, founded the Perth opera company Lost & Found, and is director of New Zealand Opera.