Urs Schönebaum, Light designer

Light and set designer Urs Schönebaum studied photography in Munich and joined the Münchner Kammerspiele from 1995 to 1998. Afterwards he was also active as a directing assistant at the Grand Théâtre de Genève, the Lincoln Center (New York) and at the Münchner Kammerspiele. Since 2000 he works as a light designer for opera, theater, dance, art installations and performances. In total, he has already collaborated in more than 130 productions, among others for Covent Garden, l’Opéra National de Paris (Palais Garnier and Bastille), the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Bayerische Staatsoper, Teatro Real in Madrid, the Bolsjoi Theater in Moscow, the Nationale Opera in Amsterdam, De Munt in Brussels, the Bayreuther and Salzburger Festspiele, the Festival d’Avignon and the Wiener Festwochen. He worked with theater directors such as Thomas Ostermeier, Pierre Audi, William Kentridge, Michael Haneke, Sasha Waltz and has a long-term collaboration with Robert Wilson. He also created light designs for artists like Anselm Kiefer, Dan Graham and Marina Abramović. In 2012 he directed and created light designs for the operas Jetzt (Mathis Nitschke) and What Next? (Elliott Carter) in the Montpellier Opera; followed by the creation of Happy Happy (Nitschke) in 2014. In 2017 he created the lighting and set for Bomarzo (Ginastera) at the Teatro Real in Madrid. Urs Schönebaum collaborated with Marina Abramović, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet on their version of Maurice Ravel’s Boléro (2013) and Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (2018).