Speaker
Laura Berman, music curator and artistic director Staatsoper Hannover
Born in Boston in 1959, Laura Berman began her music education at the Juilliard School in New York and completed her studies in music and opera directing at Princeton and Bloomington, Indiana. Thirty years ago a scholarship led her to Germany. In Cologne, together with other artists including Manos Tsangaris and Carola Bauckholt, she founded the collective New Fragments Köln for experimental music theatre. Subsequently she was engaged as assistant director and Dramaturgin in the dance department at the Städtische Bühnen in Münster and at the Staatstheater in Darmstadt. During this period, together with the choreographer Birgitta Trommler, she curated a festival of interdisciplinary art forms. The programme included works by artists such as Alain Platel, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass and Meredith Monk. As a freelance Dramaturgin, Laura Berman has worked for the Wiener Festwochen, the Bayerische Staatsoper, the Schwetzinger Festspiele, the Berlin Festival, the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, and Ballett Zürich. Amongst others she has worked with Heinz Spoerli. From 2001 to 2006 she was responsible as Dramaturgin for the music department of the Theater Freiburg. Following that, until 2012 she was artistic director of Kunst aus der Zeit at the Bregenzer Festspiele, with its programme of music theatre, performance, dance and concerts, for which she also commissioned new pieces and works of music theatre. In 2012 she set up her own artistic agency in Berlin.
