Kent George Nagano (born November 22, 1951) is an American conductor and opera administrator. From 2015 until 2025, he was Generalmusikdirektor (GMD) of the Hamburg State Opera and the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg.

Nagano was born in Berkeley, California, while his parents were in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a sansei (third-generation) Japanese-American.

He grew up in Morro Bay, a city on the Central Coast of California in San Luis Obispo County where he learned to play the piano, viola, and clarinet. He later studied sociology and music at the University of California, Santa Cruz. After graduation, he moved to San Francisco State University to study music, taking composition courses from Grosvenor Cooper and Roger Nixon. He also studied at the École Normale de Musique de Paris.

Nagano's first conducting job was with the Opera Company of Boston, where he was assistant conductor to Sarah Caldwell. In 1978, he became the conductor of the Berkeley Symphony, his first music directorship. He stepped down from this position in 2009. During his tenure in Berkeley, Nagano became a champion of the music of Olivier Messiaen and initiated a correspondence with him. He was later invited to work with Messiaen on the final stages of his opera Saint François d'Assise in Paris, where he lived with Messiaen and his wife Yvonne Loriod, whom he came to regard as his "European parents".

In 1983, Nagano conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in several of Frank Zappa's completely orchestral compositions for the first time. Nagano recorded several of Zappa's pieces on the issue London Symphony Orchestra, Vol. 1, where Zappa had personally chosen Nagano to conduct the orchestra. Nagano described this as "my first chance, my first real break". In 1984, while assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he stepped in for Seiji Ozawa on short notice and without rehearsal, receiving acclaim from the audience, orchestra, and Boston Globe critic Richard Dyer for a "noble performance" of Mahler's Ninth Symphony.

Beginning in 1985, Nagano was the music director of the Ojai Music Festival four separate times, the last in 2004, and once alongside Stephen Mosko in 1986.

Nagano has a long history of inventive programming, particularly in the chamber music repertoire. He collaborated with Icelandic artist Björk at the 1996 Verbier Festival performing Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire.

Nagano was music director of the Opéra National de Lyon from 1988 to 1998, where he recorded, with the Lyon National Opera Orchestra and chorus, numerous works including Busoni's Doktor Faust, Arlecchino and Turandot, Prokofiev's L'amour des trois oranges, Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann, the premiere of Debussy's Rodrigue et Chimène, Canteloube's Chants d'Auvergne, Berlioz's La damnation de Faust, Carlisle Floyd's Susannah, operas by Richard Strauss, the French version of Salomé and the original version of Ariadne auf Naxos, Peter Eötvös' Tri sestry, Massenet's Werther, Delibes' Coppélia, Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites, orchestral works by Maurice Ravel, and Kurt Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins.