Andreas Kriegenburg

Andreas Kriegenburg was born in Magdeburg, East Germany in 1963. In 1984 he began working as an assistant director in Zittau and Frankfurt an der Oder. In 1991, after the fall of the Wall, Kriegenburg came to Berlin; here he was an in-house director at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz until 1996. His Volksbühne staging of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck was invited to Berlin’s Theatertreffen, a festival honouring the year’s best German-language productions. Kriegenburg worked as an in-house director at the Lower Saxony State Theatre in Hanover (from 1997 to 1999) and at Vienna’s Burgtheater (from 1999 to 2001). In between times, he often directed at the Bavarian State Theatre in Munich. In the 2000/2001 season Andreas Kriegenburg assumed the post of senior director at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. There he directed many world premiere productions of new Dea Loher plays, such as Innocence and The Final Fire. His latest productions in Hamburg included: Jean-Paul Sartre’s Dirty Hands (which was invited to Berlin’s Theatertreffen festival in 2007), Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Ingmar Bergman’s From the Life of the Marionettes, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, Goethe’s Urfaust and, most recently, Molière’s The Misanthrope. In addition to his work in Hamburg, Kriegenburg also staged plays at Munich’s Kammerspiele. All of these productions were invited to the Theatertreffen festival: Aeschylus’ The Oresteia in 2002; Friedrich Hebbel’s Die Niebelungen (aka The Niebelungs) in 2004; Chekhov’s Three Sisters in 2006 and Kafka’s The Trial in 2009. Kriegenburg made his debut as an opera director in 2006, with a staging based on Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. He followed this up in 2008 with a production of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. His production of Die Niebelungen earned Andreas Kriegenburg a Nestroy -- Vienna’s most prestigious theatre award -- for Best German-language Production of 2005 and the 3-Sat Innovation Prize for his “visionary contributions to theatre”. In 2008, his staging of Dea Loher’s The Final Fire at Hamburg’s Thalia Theater won the Faust theatre award. Altogether, nine of Andreas Kriegenburg’s productions have received invitations to Berlin’s Theatertreffen festival. With the 2009/2010 theatre season, Kriegenburg joined the Deutsches Theater Berlin as an in-house director, together with the DT’s new Artistic Director Ulrich Khuon. His staging of the world premiere ‘Thieves’ by Dea Loher was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen festival as well as to Mühlheimer Theatertage – a festival for contemporary drama – where it won the viewer’s choice award, and was nominated in the category best German-language production for Nestroy theatre award. For his stagings of ‘’The Prince of Homburg’ and ‘Thieves’ he was awarded as best set designer by the jury of professional magazine ‘Theater heute’.