Alumna Anja Kühnhold New Opera Director at Theater Kiel
Musical theater director and Eisler graduate Anja Kühnhold has been the opera director at Theater Kiel since the start of the 2025/26 season. Even while studying directing at the Eisler School, she gained her first experience as an assistant director, stage manager, and in administrative theater work at the Staatsoper Berlin, the Innsbruck Festival, and the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden. In 2016, she became senior artistic director at the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, where she directed the children’s opera Schaf (2024), La finta giardiniera (2021), Gianni Schicchi (2021), the Prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos (2021), and GOLD! (2018), and conceived numerous staged Lied recitals.
At the same time, she worked as a guest director and assistant director at internationally renowned opera houses. She collaborated with Tobias Kratzer on his productions of Edgar (2018) in St. Gallen, Tannhäuser at the Bayreuth Festival in 2019, 2022, and 2024, and Fidelio at the Royal Opera House in London in 2020 and 2024. Working closely with Keith Warner, she developed the production of Elektra at the Prague State Opera in 2016, which she successfully staged in San Francisco in 2017 and in Karlsruhe in 2019, and in 2018 she took over the staging of Siegfried at the Royal Opera House in London.
This season’s program features her productions of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Baroque opera *Platée* at the Theater Hagen, as well as the two one-act operas *L’enfant et les sortilèges* and *L’heure espagnole* by Maurice Ravel at the Pfalztheater Kaiserslautern. In recent seasons, she made her successful debut as a director at the Theater Chemnitz (La Traviata, 2025), the Opernhaus Wuppertal (The Merry Wives of Windsor, 2024), and the Pfalztheater Kaiserslautern (L’elisir d’amore, 2023).
As a lecturer at the Dutch National Opera Academy, she supervised student opera productions and offered workshops.