Lani Tran-Duc

The designer Lani Tran-Duc began her career as an assistant at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. Since then, she has worked freelance as a set and costume designer both for municipal theatres and on the independent scene.

She designs sets and costumes for music theatre and drama productions, and also for dance and performance projects. She works both alone and together with Anika Marquardt as Atelier Lanika. Their first collaboration was Nicolas Stemann’s production of Kommune der Wahrheit at the Vienna Festival in 2013.

Projects in the 2025/26 season have included Ganz schön viel Ostkram at Theater Lübeck, the revival of Golda Barton’s Cypressenburg at the Vienna Burgtheater and the world premiere of Barton’s Porneia as well as Sascha Marianna Salzmann’s series Umbrüche at the Thalia Theater.

From 2010 to 2012, while still an assistant, she designed sets for the Thalia Theater and the Kulturfabrik auf Kampnagel, working with the directors Luk Perceval, Alexander Simon, Maria Ursprung and Felix Meyer-Christian. Since then, she has designed sets for venues such as the Deutsches Theater Berlin, the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, the Theater Orchester Heidelberg, the Darmstadt State Theatre, Theater Erlangen, the Deutsches Theater Göttingen, the Mousonturm in Frankfurt, the National Theatre in Mannheim, the Vienna Burgtheater and the Bühnen Bern. Many of her productions have featured at festivals such as the Stückemarkt at the Berlin Theatertreffen, the Festival Politik im Freien Theater, the asphalt Festival and the Lucerne Festival.

She enjoys longstanding collaborations with the director Helge Schmidt, the performer and director Simone Dede Ayivi, the director Isabelle Redfern and the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja.

Lani Tran-Duc was born in 1982 in Munich and studied architecture at the University of the Arts in Berlin and at ETSAV in Barcelona. In 2014 she won the Rolf Mares Theatre Prize in Hamburg in the category ‘best stage design’ for her designs for Jon Fosse’s Besuch, in a production directed by Maria Ursprung at the Lichthof Theater. In 2019 Helge Schmidt’s Cum-Ex Papers received the DER FAUST Theatre Prize, and in 2021 Schmidt’s production Tax for free was awarded the Rolf Mares Theatre Prize in Hamburg. Both productions featured designs by Atelier Lanika.