Katharina Schmitt

Biography

Katharina Schmitt, director and playwright, was born in 1979 in Bremen. Schmitt studied
directing at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.
In 2006, she was awarded the Lenz Award for playwrights; in recent years, her plays have been performed at prestigious theaters (Thalia Theater Hamburg, Deutsches Theater Berlin,
Schauspiel Leipzig, Schauspiel Stuttgart, Divadlo Komedie Prague, Watermill Center
New York). In her directing work, Schmitt focuses on shows that combine visual arts
and theater. In Prague, she has directed, among others, Klaus Händl’s Dark Inviting World
at Divadlo Komedie (2007), Tim Crouch’s England at MeetFactory (2009),
the first part of Divadlo Komedies triptych The Last Days of Mankind (2011), and Elfriede Jelinek’s him not himself at MeetFactory (2011). She is one of the core directors at Studio Hrdinů theater, where she has directed Arno Schmidt’s Black Mirrors (2013), Thomas Mann’s The Blood of the Wälsungs (2014), and A Report on the Party and the Guests (2015), an adaptation of Jan Němec’s film of the same name, among others. In 2016, she directed György Ligeti’s operas Aventures & Nouvelles Aventures, the opening of the New Opera Days in Ostrava.