Johannes Leiacker

Johannes Leiacker works worldwide as a set and costume designer for opera and theatre. His engagements have taken him to such venues as the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Bavarian and Vienna State Operas, the Paris Opéra, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam, the Los Angeles Opera, the Houston Grand Opera, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and the opera houses of Frankfurt, Madrid, Brussels, Copenhagen, Zurich, Helsinki, Moscow and Tokyo, as well as to the Salzburg, Bregenz and Baden-Baden Festivals.

He has a longstanding collaborative partnership with the director Christof Loy, for whom his set designs include Die Frau ohne Schatten and Ariodante at the Salzburg Festival in 2011 and 2017 respectively, and, recently, Luisa Miller for Glyndebourne Festival, Salome for the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki, Schreker’s Der Schatzgräber at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Christmas Eve in Frankfurt (named Production of the Year 2021/22 by the magazine Opernwelt) and Königskinder in Amsterdam. The production of Tristan und Isolde on which he worked with Loy at Covent Garden won an Olivier Award in 2010, and their Peter Grimes for the Theater an der Wien received the International Opera Award for New Production of the Year in 2016.

Johannes Leiacker’s numerous productions with Peter Konwitschny include Rihm’s Die Eroberung von Mexico at the 2015 Salzburg Festival and, more recently, Les Huguenots and Norma at the Semperoper Dresden. He has also designed sets for several productions by Dietrich Hilsdorf and Rolando Villazón, and has recently worked with directors including R. B. Schlather, Katharina Thoma, Johannes Erath and Hans Walter Richter.

In 1996, 2009 and 2018 Johannes Leiacker was named Set Designer of the Year in the critics’ survey of the magazine Opernwelt. Until 2010 he was a professor at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts.