Tanja Hofmann was born in Bamberg and graduated from the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz in 1997 with a degree in stage and costume design. Her teachers in Graz were Wolfram Skalicki and Hans Schavernoch. Even while she was still a student she was already working as an assistant at the Bayreuth Festival. On graduating she worked as an assistant at the Berliner Ensemble and the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. She has been a freelance costume and set designer since 2003, designing the costumes and sets for theatres in Frankfurt, Leipzig, Stuttgart, Munich, Nuremberg, Berlin, Bayreuth, Saarbrücken, Graz, Linz, Vienna, Salzburg, Tokyo, Paris and Havana. Among the numerous directors with whom she has worked over many years are Helen Malkowsky, Maximilian von Mayenburg, Andreas Baesler and Georg Schmiedleitner, whose production of Maderna’s Satyricon was mounted at the 2018 Salzburg Easter Festival and subsequently revived at the Dresden State Opera and in Modena.
Tanja Hofmann’s work with Andreas Kriegenburg includes Tosca for the Frankfurt Opera, Don Giovanni for the Dresden State Opera, Rigoletto for the New National Theatre in Tokyo and Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which marked her Salzburg Festival debut in 2017. Their most recent work together has been Les Huguenots at the Paris Opéra and Jörg Widmann’s Babylon at the Berlin State Opera.