Joana Mallwitz has served as chief conductor and artistic director of the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchestra since the beginning of the 2023/24 season. Since making her acclaimed debut at the Salzburg Festival in 2020 with Così fan tutte she has become known internationally as one of the most outstanding conductors of her generation. She has also enjoyed triumphs at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Bavarian State Opera, the Semperoper Dresden, the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, the Frankfurt Opera and the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen.
Joana Mallwitz works regularly with leading orchestras worldwide, including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, the Munich Philharmonic, the Orchestre National de France, the Orchestre de Paris and the Bamberg Symphony.
In the 2025/26 season she and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra opened the Baden-Baden Easter Festival with a new production of Lohengrin, marking the beginning of a multi-year collaboration with both the festival and the orchestra. She also returned to the Zurich Opera House, where she opened the first season under the new artistic management conducting Der Rosenkavalier.
Joana Mallwitz is an exclusive artist with Deutsche Grammophon. She was awarded the Opus Klassik as Conductor of the Year in 2025 for her CD The Kurt Weill Album, recorded with the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchestra. Alongside subscription concerts in Berlin, in the 2025/26 season she conducted the orchestra on a European tour, and in a recording of Haydn’s The Creation.
Following four successful years as Europe’s youngest general music director at Theater Erfurt, in 2018 Joana Mallwitz took up the same post at the Nuremburg State Theatre. There she attracted considerable national attention through opera productions, concerts and new-format events and after just one season was named Conductor of the Year by the critics’ poll of the magazine Opernwelt. She launched the ‘Expedition Concerts’ and an orchestral academy in Erfurt and the Junge Staatsphilharmonie in Nuremberg, creating successful projects that continue to have an impact today. In 2024 the Nuremburg State Philharmonic awarded her the title of ‘honorary conductor’, a distinction conferred for the first time in the orchestra’s history.
Joana Mallwitz was born in Hildesheim and studied at the University of Music, Drama and Media in Hanover. She is a recipient of the Bavarian Order of the Constitution and was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit of Germany in 2023.
