WHEN Netia Jones was about 10 and growing up in England, she saw her first opera. It was Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes,” and it changed her life.

“I was a child and a bit of a weirdo, but I was obsessed with it,” she said during a recent visit to New York. “My way of responding to things I got obsessed about was making a poster. So I made endless posters for ‘Peter Grimes.’ That was my way of owning and interpreting the idea of performance. It was always design led.”

Her impulse to convert her obsessions into images has hardly changed since then, but her toolbox has been transformed. Incorporating video and projections into performances with creativity and fluency, she has swiftly become one of the most interesting innovators in classical music. Naming her to its Hot 100 list in 2009, The Observer of London said simply, “Netia Jones is the most imaginative director of opera working in Britain today.”

Starting on Thursday, Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic will give four performances of Ms. Jones’s version of Oliver Knussen’s opera “Where the Wild Things Are,” a piquant adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s children’s book. The production, conceived with Sendak’s blessing but completed after his death in May, was commissioned by the orchestra, the Barbican Center in London and the Aldeburgh festival and had its premiere there in June. It puts the singing actors in front of a wall of projections of the book’s classic illustrations, which Ms. Jones animates in real time. The performance can’t go on without her.