Katharina Schmitt

playwright and director

Katharina Schmitt studied theatre directing at the Prague Academy of Arts and works as a director and playwright.

She has collaborated with many international theatres and festivals, such as the Prague National Theatre, the Thalia Theater Hamburg, the Schauspiel Leipzig, the Schauspiel Stuttgart, the Watermill Center New York, NODO Ostrava and the Munich Biennale for musical theatre, among others.

In her work as director, Katharina Schmitt focuses on immersive forms that oscilate between visual arts and theatre. Since 2012 she is an associate director at the Prague Theatre Studio Hrdinů, based in the Prague National Gallery and specialising in interdisciplinary formats. Schmitt has also worked as librettist and director within music theatre: in 2016, she directed Györge Ligeti’s operas Aventures & Nouvelles Aventures, the opening of NODO Ostrava, and, in 2017, Jiří Kadeřábek’s opera No Man, for which she co-wrote the libretto, at the Prague National Theatre. In 2018 she directed Everything Goes to Plan by Ondřej Adámek, for which she also wrote the libretto, at the Munich Biennale for musical theatre. Her new music theatre project, A Study of Aphasia based on a composition by Michal Rataj, is scheduled to premiere in Summer 2020.

Katharina Schmitt has received numerous awards and scholarships, amongst others a a EHF 2010 Fellowship, a fellowship at the Watermill Center New York, the City of Jena Lenz Award for playwrights, the Martha Saalfeld Award for literature, a research fellowship from the Berlin Senate for Culture and has participated in residencies in
Europe and the United States.