Kirill Serebrennikov
Kirill Serebrennikov was born Rostov-on-Don and graduated in physics there in 1992. During his university studies he began a career as a self-taught theatre, opera, film and TV director and costume designer.
Salome at Stuttgart Opera and Il barbiere di Siviglia at the Komische Oper Berlin were the first highly regarded productions which introduced Kirill Serebrennikov to an audience outside Russia. Together with Teodor Currentzis, Kirill Serebrennikov created Mysterion (based on Carl Orff’s De Temporum Fine Comedia) and the charity project Requiem (by Alexei Sioumak), in which he also worked as an author. Other productions were Falstaff at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, Le coq d´or at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, and American Lulu at the Vienna Festival.
His interpretation of Così fan tutte at Zurich Opera in autumn 2018 was a sensational success, as were his Nabucco production at Hamburg State Opera in spring 2019 and his Il barbiere di Siviglia production at Basel Theatre in autumn 2019. In March 2020 Kirill Serebrennikov débuted with his first play in Germany, staging his adaptation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decamerone at the Deutsche Theater Berlin.
Kirill Serebrennikov won awards at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival for his film The Student. Other films such as The Swallow, Mysteries of the Storm, Playing the Victim, The Diary of a Murderer were shown at the film festivals in Rome, Locarno and Venice, and were nominated for the Golden Lion and the Grand Prix of Kinotavr in Sochi.
Kirill Serebrennikov has staged not only numerous classics of Russian literature, but also works ranging from Shakespeare through Brecht to the Irish playwright Martin McDonagh. His production of Plastilin by von Vassily Sigarev won an arte award, and has been invited to numerous European theatre festivals. In 2011 he founded an experimental workshop project Plattform in Moscow.
As artistic director of Studio Seven, a collective of young artists, his productions include A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. Studio Seven became part of the Gogol Centre, where Kirill Serebrennikov has been artistic director since 2012.
The Gogol Centre in Moscow is a genre-breaking theatrical laboratory, and is unique in the Russian cultural landscape. Here he staged, among other things, Dead Souls by Gogol, a musical adaptation of Duncan Sheik, which is based on Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, and Machine Müller, based on Heiner Müllers’ Hamletmachine in collaboration with the Goethe Institute.
Kirill Serebrennikov was awarded the Golden Mask in April 2019 for his productions of the Nureyev at Bolshoi Theatre ballet and Pushkin’s Little Tragedies at the Gogol Centre.