Birgit Kajtna-Wönig was born in Graz and studied music theatre directing at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. Since 2018 she has been an house director at the Hamburg State Opera. Previously, she was engaged for eleven seasons at the Vienna State Opera, where she worked on more than thirty productions.
Internationally, she has worked at venues including the Tokyo Bunka Kaikan, La Scala, Milan, the Wuppertaler Bühnen, the State Theatres of Mainz and Stuttgart, Graz Opera and the Vienna Burgtheater, and at the Salzburg and Bregenz Festivals, the Schwetzingen SWR Festival and Bard SummerScape in New York.
She has directed projects such as Schneewittchen at the Hamburg State Opera and Alma Deutscher’s opera Cinderella at the Vienna State Opera, also released on DVD. She has a close working partnership with the conductor Adam Fischer. Together they developed Orfeo ed Euridice, a staged version of Haydn’s L’anima del filosofo, for the Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra in the Düsseldorf Tonhalle. They have also presented this production with the Danish Chamber Orchestra in Copenhagen, and at the Theater an der Wien and the Graz Musikverein. At the 2023 Salzburg Festival they created a semi-staged production of Mozart’s Il re pastore. This was followed in February 2025 by a staging of Mitridate, re di Ponto at the Hamburg State Opera.
Beyond opera, she dedicates herself to exploring innovative formats. These have included the art song project Die Liebe liebt das Wandern — eine Smartphone Dichtung for the Vienna State Opera and the staged recital Das Laub fällt auch im Paradies for the Hamburg State Opera.
Together with the artist KUOKO and in co-operation with Hamburg’s Dehmelhaus Foundation, she developed the music video Ida’s Song, for which she was producer and director. It received its premiere in October 2022 at the Thalia Theater, and in 2023 won awards at the Female Filmmakers Festival Berlin, the Portugal Indie Film Festival and the Vienna International Film Awards. With Barbara Nüsse and Günter Schaupp, Birgit Kajtna-Wönig also initiated the project ‘Zuhause bei Ida Dehmel’, for which she was responsible for production development, production and staging, in co-operation with the Dehmelhaus and as part of the first Jewish Culture Days in Hamburg.
