BK Opera was founded in Melbourne in 2016 by Kate Millett from a simple conviction: that opera could be darker, more intimate, and more dangerous than what was on offer in Australia. In the decade since, it has grown into one of Australia's most distinctive independent opera companies — award-winning, critically acclaimed, and consistently pushing the boundaries of what the artform can be while remaining deeply respectful of the music at its core.

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Over ten years and more than 20 productions, BK Opera has built a reputation for bold, visceral, psychologically intense work that treats both its artists and its audiences as intelligent adults. The company has presented repertoire ranging from Verdi, Mozart, and Puccini to Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle, Maxwell Davies' The Lighthouse, Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride and Orphée et Eurydice, and Poulenc's La Voix Humaine — championing works that rarely appear on Australian stages and creating opportunities for singers to expand their repertoire into challenging and rewarding territory. In 2023, BK Opera co-produced the world premiere of The Sea with Forest Collective, nominated for Best New Australian Opera at the Green Room Awards.

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The company has been recognised with multiple OperaChaser Critics' Choice Awards, including Best Director 2024 for Don Giovanni, and has received Green Room Award nominations across four consecutive years. Artistic Director and founder Kate Millett has been awarded an Ian Potter Cultural Trust Emerging Artist Grant and a Seaborn, Broughton & Walford Foundation Performing Arts Grant in recognition of her work and its contribution to Australian opera. Her production of Macbeth in 2025 was described by Classic Melbourne as "one of the outstanding operatic productions of the year" and by Limelight as delivering "vividly visceral staging."

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BK Opera occupies a unique position in the Australian opera landscape. Operating entirely independently — without ongoing government subsidy or institutional infrastructure — the company has the freedom to programme adventurously, respond quickly to artistic opportunities, and take risks that larger companies cannot. This independence has allowed BK Opera to build an audience that is genuinely new to opera: people who come curious and uncertain, and come back transformed. The company has consistently demonstrated that opera does not need to be intimidating or inaccessible — that presented with intelligence, intimacy, and conviction, it can be one of the most powerful experiences available to a contemporary Australian audience.

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Kate Millett herself has worked extensively across the Australian opera sector as an individual artist — as director and assistant director with Victorian Opera, Opera Australia, Melbourne Opera, iOpera, Pinchgut Opera, WA Opera, and Canberra Opera, and as an observer under Neil Armfield at the Adelaide Festival. This breadth of experience across the country's major institutions informs and deepens everything she brings to BK Opera's work. In 2026 she undertook an extended personal professional development program in Europe, observing at Finnish National Opera, Oper Wuppertal, the Royal Swedish Opera, and the Royal Opera House — experience that continues to shape her artistic vision and her understanding of what opera can achieve at the highest international level.

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In October 2026, BK Opera presents its most ambitious production to date: Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, in a 2.5-hour staging accompanied by two pianos at Northcote Town Hall. This intimate, visceral production — designed to place audiences inside the psychological world of the opera rather than at a distance from its spectacle — represents a decade of artistic development brought to bear on one of the greatest works in the operatic canon. It is a production that could only be made by a company with BK Opera's history, its fearlessness, and its absolute commitment to the music it serves.