Villa Serpentara Fellowship 2026
Michael Graessner
*1969 in Berlin (DE)
Lives in Berlin (DE)
Instagram: @michael.graessner
Section: Performing arts
Vita
Michael Graessner studied stage and costume design at the Berlin University of the Arts under Achim Freyer. Since the 1990s, he has worked as a stage and costume designer with numerous directors at renowned theatres, including the Volksbühne Berlin, Münchner Kammerspiele (Munich), Schauspiel Frankfurt, Maxim Gorki Theater, Deutsches Theater Berlin, Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Theater Neumarkt Zürich, Theater Basel, Semper Oper and the Komische Oper Berlin. In recent years, Graessner has worked as a performer and scenographer with the FARN collective led by actress Sandra Hüller and with the performance collective matthaei & konsorten. Here he has created filmic works, installations in public spaces and scenographies for a wide variety of stages.
Residency
In his artistic practice, Michael Graessner often operates at the interface between theatre and social intervention. His spatial concepts are always conceived as play arrangements with a strong call to action – performative inventions that are equally at home in museums, theatres, and public spaces such as churches and libraries. Since the large urban projects together with the Federal Cultural Foundation, his stages have increasingly become social sculptures. At Serpentara, he will edit his new book and compile designs, images and texts that he has collected over the years into a comprehensive catalogue. His many years of creating drawings on space and sculpture will gradually extend into the present, and the book can be seen as a further outlook on the coming years.