Mara Kurotschka appointed Professor of Acting at the Hanns Eisler School of Music Berlin
Director and choreographer Mara Kurotschka has been appointed Professor of Acting at the Hanns Eisler School of Music Berlin with effect from 1 July 2025. She has already been teaching at the school as a visiting professor of scenic instruction since 2021.
Mara Kurotschka is a graduate of the Juilliard School in New York. Her choreographic works have been performed at New York's Lincoln Center, the Théâtre de Caen, the Ruhrtriennale, the Salzburg Festival and the Münchner Kammerspiele, among others. Before turning to opera, she worked for several years in theatre alongside Armin Petras, as well as with directors such as Sebastian Baumgarten, Peter Kastenmüller, Lorenzo Fioroni, Corinna von Rad and Johanna Schall.
She has co-directed numerous opera productions with Philipp Stölzl at the Basel Theatre, the Stuttgart State Opera, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Berlin State Opera and the Wiener Festwochen. She has worked with Jürgen Flimm at the State Opera Berlin and at the Mikhailovsky Theatre in St. Petersburg.
Her production of the Ukrainian premiere of The Flying Dutchman at the Donbass Opera in Donetsk was invited as a guest performance to the Kiev National Opera, the Odessa Opera House and the Lviv National Opera and was honoured with the most important Ukrainian cultural award, the Taras Shevchenko Prize, in 2014.
Mara Kurochka's video works on everyday movements in mega-cities have attracted great attention and have been shown at the ZKM Karlsruhe, the Museums of Contemporary Art in Rome (MACRO) and Seville, Kampnagel Hamburg, the FU Berlin and Villa Massimo, among others.
As a coach, she has been training international researchers and research groups for many years on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Education, Technology and Space and the German University Association for third-party funding applications such as Clusters of Excellence, European Research Grants, Collaborative Research Centres, Käte Hamburger Colleges and others.
She has received numerous awards from the Baden-Württemberg Art Foundation, the Berlin Academy of the Arts and the German Federal Cultural Foundation, among others, and has served on the jury of the German National Academic Foundation.