Elena Zaytseva studied at the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts in her home city of St Petersburg. From 1990 to 1995 she was a costume assistant and costume designer for the film production company Lenfilm in St Petersburg. After working at the Mariinsky Theatre she moved to become head of costume at the Novaya Opera in Moscow. Since 2003 she has held the same position at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre, where she has designed costumes for numerous opera and ballet productions.
Her engagements as a costume designer have taken her to numerous prestigious venues, among them the opera houses of Volgograd, Perm, Chelyabinsk, Astrakhan, Krasnoyarsk and Yekaterinburg, the Lithuanian National Opera in Vilnius, the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava, the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, the Paris Opéra, La Monnaie in Brussels, the English National Opera, the Teatro Real in Madrid, the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, La Scala, Milan and the Zurich Opera House.
Recent productions for which Elena Zaytseva has created costumes include Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Berlin State Opera, War and Peace at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, Così fan tutte and Iphigénie en Aulide / Iphigénie en Tauride at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, From the House of the Dead at the Ruhrtriennale, Rusalka at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples and Salome and Ariadne auf Naxos at the Hamburg State Opera.
