Stephan Kimmig

Stephan Kimmig was born in 1959 in Stuttgart. After training to be an actor, he worked as an assistant director at the Schillertheater in Berlin. From 1988 to 1996 Kimmig lived in Amsterdam, working as a director in the off-theatre scene in both the Netherlands and Belgium. Kimmig has worked regularly with artistic director Friedrich Schirmer, first at the Städtische Bühnen in Freiburg and then at the Stuttgart Playhouse where he was an in-house director from 1998 to 2000. Thereafter Kimmig staged productions at the Deutsches Theater Berlin, Munich’s Kammerspiele, Vienna’s Burgtheater and worked regularly at the Thalia Theater Hamburg under artistic director Ulrich Khuon. When Khuon assumed the position of artistic director at the Deutsches Theater in 2009, Kimmig joined him in Berlin as an in-house director. In the same year, Kimmig also produced his first opera at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. Stephan Kimmig has won many accolades, including a Nestroy – Vienna’s top theatre award – as Best Director for his production of Franz Grillparzer’s The Golden Fleece. Kimmig’s works have been invited to Berlin’s prestigious Theatertreffen festival several times, including his Stuttgart State Theatre production of Thystes, based on Seneca’s play, and his Thalia Theater stagings of A Doll’s House by Ibsen, and Schiller’s Mary Stuart. In 2007, his staging of Mary Stuart earned Kimmig the Rolf Mares ‘Outstanding Production’ award and the Faust theatre prize for Best Director. Together with stage designer Katja Haß, Kimmig was awarded the 3-sat Innovation Prize for “visionary contributions to German-language theatre” at Berlin's Theatertreffen festival. At the Deutsches Theater Berlin, Stephan Kimmig’s recent works include the world-premiere productions of Oil by Lukas Bärfuss and How You Talk the Game by Yasmina Reza. Kimmig also directed Maxim Gorky’s Children of the Sun (for which he won the 2011 Faust theatre prize for Best Director).