Born in Berlin 1973, she studied opera direction and was the ultimate Meisterschülerin of Ruth Berghaus. From 1998 until 2001 she worked as a director’s assistant at the Graz Oper. Her debut was Puccini’s Turandot in 2001. Her stylistic range reaches from the pre-classical (Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Handel’s Jephtha and Alcina, Alessandro Scarlatti’s Cain) to modern repertory (Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero, Sciarrino’s Macbeth). In 2004 she inaugurated the Lucerne Theatre’s season with a staging of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, that was presented in Bavarian State Opera Munich, Cologne and Prague later on. Early engagements led her to both Berlin’s Staatsoper and Deutsche Oper. In close collaboration with Claudio Abbado, she presented a semi-staged production of Beethoven’s Fidelio at Lucerne’s Festival in 2010. From 2011 to 2014 she was the Artistic Director of the Mainz Opera. She directed Rigoletto successfully in Zurich, to be followed by Aida, Die Zauberflöte, Werther, La finta giardiniera, Lucia di Lammermoor and two highly profiled stagings of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre and Beat Furrer’s Das grosse Feuer. In Bremen she staged Eugene Onegin, Mazeppa, Hartmann’s Simplicius Simplicissimus, Don Giovanni, L’incoronazione di Poppea and The Cunning Little Vixen, opening her personal Janáček trilogy, that may grow well beyond Káťa Kabanová and Jenůfa, staged in both Genève and Dusseldorf/Duisburg’s Deutsche Oper am Rhein. Wagner is one of the central challenges of her artistic work. Parsifal, produced at the Vlaamse Opera in Antwerp and Ghent in 2013 and revived in 2018, marked a highlight of her career. She was named Director of the Year by the jury of Germany’s magazine OPERNWELT in 2013. She staged Der fliegende Holländer in Antwerp and Lohengrin in Essen, before facing the most challenging enterprise, a new reading of Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Theater an der Wien in 2017. Condensing the tetralogy to a trilogy, this “Ring” was based upon the so-called “Coburg version,” focussed on Hagen, Siegfried and Brünnhilde, the protagonists of the “second generation.” The last seasons were marked by her debut at the Vienna Staatsoper with Il trittico, the rediscovery of Louise Bertin’s forgotten Fausto in Essen and La Juive in Frankfurt.