Marie Schleef

I am a theater director whose work focuses on the unknown, the forgotten, and the unseen. My particularly interest lies in staging texts by women* that have never before been performed in the context of the (German-speaking) theater world.

I hold a degree from Bard College, New York, as well as the German theater academy „Ernst Busch“ in Berlin and worked as a directing assistant at the Volksbühne Berlin, including for Susanne Kennedy.

After graduating I completed a trilogy starting with To the Lighthouse (Volksbühne Berlin, 2018) after Virginia Woolf, followed by the long-durational performance NAME HER. In Search of Women+ (Ballhaus Ost and Kosmos Theater Vienna, 2020)—which was invited to Theatertreffen 2021—and lastly The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin (Ballhaus Ost and Kosmos Theater Vienna, 2022). In 2021 I was one of the lucky recipients of the CHANEL Next Prize, which honors ten emerging and innovative artists world-wide. Additionally, I was awarded the Kurt-Hübner-Regiepreis 2022 for my stage-adaption of a Guardian article titled Once I lived with a Stranger (Schauspiel Köln, 2022). In the following season, I staged the world premiere of Liz Ziemska’s short story The Mushroom Queen in Hamburg (Deutsches Schauspielhaus, 2023) and Cho Nam-Joo’s novel Kim Jiyoung, born 1982 (Schauspiel Köln, 2023). In spring of 2024 I will bring Shirley Jackson’s The Possibility of Evil onto the stage at the Münchner Kammerspiele and thus introduce this incredible US-American author to a (German-speaking) theater audience.