Sebastian Baumgarten

* 1969 in Berlin, studied directing for the opera at the Hanns Eisler School of Music in Berlin, and later worked with Ruth Berghaus, Einar Schleef and Robert Wilson. During his time as a senior director at Kassel's state theatre, he received the Götz-Friedrich prize for his production of Tosca. He then became an executive director at the Meiningen Court Theatre. In 2006, he was voted opera director of the year in a critics' poll conducted by Opernwelt magazine. Sebastian Baumgarten works as a crossover artist between drama and music theatre in Zurich, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Dresden, at the Komische Oper Berlin and the Bayreuth Festival. His Zurich production of Brecht's Saint Joan of the Stockyards was invited to the Theatertreffen festival in Berlin in 2013. Baumgarten has been a professor at the August Everding Bavarian Theatre Academy in Munich since 2013, where he runs the degree programme in direction. At the Maxim Gorki Theatre his productions have included: Professor Unrat or The End of a Tyrant, Danton's Death, and most recently, Heiner Müller's Zement. In the season 22/23 he brings Amerika by Franz Kafka to the stage. In October 2024, he will stage Linkerhand based on Brigitte Reimann's novel Franziska Linkerhand.