Victoria Behr was born in 1979 and studied costume design with Dirk von Bodisco at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. After graduating she worked as an assistant at the Bochum Schauspielhaus, the Zurich Schauspielhaus, the Zurich Opera House and the Salzburg Festival. Since 2008 she has worked as a freelance costume designer.
Victoria Behr has worked with the directors Lucia Bihler, Jan Bosse, Herbert Fritsch, Barrie Kosky, Dagmar Manzel, Antú Romero Nunes and Lilja Rupprecht at venues including the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin, the Vienna Burgtheater, the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, the Residenztheater in Munich, Theater Basel, Theater Bremen, the Komische Oper Berlin, the Vienna State Opera, the Bavarian State Opera, the Opéra de Lyon (in a co-production with the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence), the Paris Opéra, the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, and the Salzburg Festival.
For the director Benedict Andrews she has designed costumes at the Young Vic in London (in a co-production with St Ann’s Warehouse in New York), the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen, the Komische Oper Berlin, the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam and the English National Opera.
With the directors Peter Carp, Matthias Hartmann, Niklaus Helbling, Marcus Lobbes, Anna-Sophie Mahler and Stefan Pucher she has worked at venues including the Zurich Schauspielhaus, the Zurich Opera House, the Oldenburg State Theatre, Theater Freiburg, the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, Theater Oberhausen and the Vienna Volkstheater.
Victoria Behr has been named Costume Designer of the Year six times by the critics’ forum of the magazine Theater heute: in 2011 for Nora, in 2012 for Die (s)panische Fliege, in 2014 for Ohne Titel Nr. 1, in 2015 for der die mann, in 2020 for Amphitryon and in 2023 for Die Eingeborenen von Maria Blut. She was named Costume Designer of the Year by the magazine Opernwelt in 2013 for costumes for Frau Luna at the Berlin Volksbühne and for Peter Eötvös’s Three Sisters in Zurich. In 2024 she and the set designer Pia Maria Mackert jointly received the Viennese Nestroy Prize for best designs for Die Verwandlung at the Burgtheater.
