Ján Zavarský

Born in 1948 in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia, where he attended the school of art and design. In Bratislava he first studied architecture, then in 1974 he completed his studies of stage design with Ladislav Vychodil at the Academy of Music and Drama. In 1972-73, while still at school, he worked as a stage designer in the Andrej Bagar Theatre in Nitra. Between 1975 and 1979 he was a stage designer for the Puppet State Theatre in Bratislava and then he joined the Trnava Theatre in the same capacity. Since 1981 he has also collaborated with the Goose-on-a-String Theatre in Brno on a regular basis. Since 1979 he has been professor of stage design at the Academy of Music and Drama, and from 1994 he simultaneously taught stage design at the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno. Between 1992 and 1993 he was a guest stage designer and teacher at Miami University. He has been the president of the Slovak National Centre OISTAT since 1996. He has a number of drama, puppet and opera stage designs to his credit not only in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, but also in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland, Germany, Switzerland and the USA. In addition to stage design he has been engaged in graphic design, independent creation and architecture. His works have appeared in more than thirty exhibitions and received many important awards. Zavarský has been a stage designer from the age of twenty-one and has made some three hundred sets to date for various kinds stage genre, in many cases also including costume design. Update: 2002