Klaus Bruns

Klaus Bruns comes from Mühlheim an der Ruhr and has worked as a costume designer for more than thirty years. His engagements have taken him to the three Berlin opera houses, the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, the Vienna State Opera, the Theater an der Wien, the Paris Opéra, the English National Opera, the opera houses of Nuremberg, Hanover, Mannheim, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Essen, Amsterdam, Antwerp / Ghent, Turin, Catania, Zurich and Geneva and to the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro and the Bayreuth Festival. He has worked with directors such as Götz Friedrich, Harry Kupfer, Guy Joosten and Peter Mussbach, and in more recent times has worked regularly with Damiano Michieletto. He has a longstanding artistic partnership with Barrie Kosky. In 2018 he was named Costume Designer of the Year by the critics’ forum of the magazine Opernwelt for his costume designs for Kosky’s Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. In 2024 he received the Oper! Award as best costume designer for the world premiere of Alexander Raskatov’s Animal Farm in Amsterdam.

He made his Salzburg Festival debut in 2021 with the Shakespeare production Richard the Kid & the King, directed by Karin Henkel, with whom he has worked for more than twenty years. In spoken theatre he has also designed costumes for productions by Michael Talke, Georg Schmiedleitner, Niklaus Helbling, Nicolai Sykosch, Jessica Steinke, Barrie Kosky, Johan Simons and others, and has worked at leading theatres in the German-speaking countries, including the Munich Kammerspiele, the Vienna Burgtheater, the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and the theatres of Bochum, Zurich, Stuttgart, Cologne, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Leipzig and Hamburg.