Olaf Freese

Olaf Freese was born in 1968 in Berlin and completed his technical training with the Berliner Ensemble and at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. In the ensuing years he worked as head of the lighting departments of the Hanover State Theatre, the Deutsches Theater Berlin and the Berlin State Opera.

Since 1982 he has worked as a lighting designer for many prestigious theatres and opera houses, among them the Deutsches Schauspielhaus and the State Opera in Hamburg, the Residenztheater and the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, the Burgtheater and the State Opera in Vienna, the Hanover State Theatre, the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, La Scala, Milan, the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow and the New National Theatre in Tokyo.

Olaf Freese was the lighting designer for Rusalka (directed by Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito), Der Freischütz (directed by Falk Richter), Fidelio (directed by Claus Guth) and for the world premiere of Peter Handke’s Zdeněk Adamec (directed by Friederike Heller) at the Salzburg Festival, and also for Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (directed by Stefan Herheim) and Die Walküre (directed by Vera Nemirova) at the Salzburg Easter Festival.

In 2016 he developed the lighting concept for Lydia Steier’s production of Stockhausen’s Donnerstag aus Licht at Theater Basel, which was voted Performance of the Year by the critics in the magazine Opernwelt. He created the lighting design for Beat Furrer’s Violetter Schnee (directed by Claus Guth), which in 2019 was awarded the theatre prize Der Faust for Étienne Pluss’s stage design.

Along with his work in the theatre, Olaf Freese teaches lighting design at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg.