Designer Esther Bialas collaborates frequently with director Barrie Kosky.
Her collaborations as a stage and costume designer with director Barrie Kosky include Strindberg’s A Dream Play (Deutsche Theater Berlin), Strauss’s The Silent Woman (Bavarian State Opera), as well as Ball im Savoy, Seven Songs/The Seven Deadly Sins, West Side Story and The Magic Flute (Komische Oper Berlin).
She also has a longstanding collaboration with director Nicolas Stemann, designing costumes for his productions of Hamlet (Schauspiel Hannover), Jelinek’s The Work (Burgtheater, Vienna) and Schiller’s The Robbers (Thalia Theater, Hamburg). Together with director Christiane Pohle, she founded the women’s theater company LaborLavache, presented at the Schauspielhaus Zürich.
She has designed stage and costume designs for the Basel Theater, Vienna Burgtheater and the Deutsche Theater Berlin, for opera productions in Lucerne and Basel, as well as for film. Other design credits include The Tales of Hoffmann (Bregenzer Festspiele, directed by Stefan Herheim); Eötvös’s Three Sisters (Vienna State Opera); costumes for La Cenerentola (Oslo Opera, directed by Stefan Herheim); and costumes for La Traviata (Theater Basel, directed by Daniel Kramer).
Esther Bialas studied costume design in Hamburg. Since 2004 she has taught costume design at the Lerchenfeld University in Hamburg.
