Katja Kolm

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The Austrian actress Katja Kolm works successfully for theatre, film and opera. She plays people with different characters in many genres and is also commissioned for demanding vocal roles.

She chooses her work carefully so that she also has time for her family. Rebecca Saunders, one of the most important composers of our time, cast Katja Kolm exclusively in her opera, which she is currently writing. In it, she will be the only actress to take on a leading speaking and singing role. The world premiere will take place in 2025 at the Deutsche Oper Berlin under the direction of the Dead Centre duo. In 2021, Katja Kolm, who speaks Russian, began collecting Alexei Navalny’s prison writings. After years of preparation, fuelled by the desire to bring these remarkable texts to a German-speaking audience, the reading Hallo, hier spricht Nawalny took place at the Salzburg Festival in 2024. Michael Maertens read the texts by Alexey Navalny and Katja Kolm those by Yulia Navalnaya from the period 2020-2024.

Katja Kolm, born in 1974, grew up in Salzburg. As a young girl she sang and acted in operas and musicals, as a teenager she was engaged by directors from Lithuania and Moscow in spoken theatre. At the age of 18, after graduating from high school, she went to Moscow for a year. There she received acting lessons from Rosetta Nemchinskaya at the GITIS Moscow Theatre Academy and singing and Russian lessons at the Gnessin Institute. During her subsequent studies at the Ernst Busch State Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin, she performed at the Maxim Gorki Theatre and the Hebbel Theatre. From 1997 to 2000 she was engaged at the Landestheater Tübingen and the Deutsches Theater Göttingen, where she worked with Falk Richter.

In 2000, Christoph Marthaler took over the directorship of the Schauspielhaus Zürich, Falk Richter became the in-house director and Katja Kolm became a member of the newly founded ensemble. In Zurich she also made her first own production, bumsti!, based on The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus. In 2005, Katja Kolm terminated her permanent theatre contract at the Schauspielhaus Zürich in order to be able to organise her professional and family life independently. This was followed by engagements at the Volksbühne Berlin, Münchner Kammerspiele, Schauspielhaus Wien, Volkstheater Wien, Ruhrtriennale, Salzburger Festspiele, Wiener Festwochen and the Lucerne Festival. Some of the productions have been invited to numerous international festivals, such as the Festival d’Avignon, Festival d’Automne Paris, BITEF Belgrade, Tokyo and Santiago de Chile. Guest performances have also taken them to the Schauspielhaus Hamburg, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Berliner Festspiele MaerzMusik and the Mühlheimer Theatertage. Several productions in which she has participated have been invited to the Berliner Theater Treffen.

Among the approximately 50 theatre productions in which she has always played major roles are Christoph Marthaler’s productions of Schutz vor der Zukunft, O.T. Eine Ersatzpassion, Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald, Letzte Tage. Ein Vorabend, Das Goldene Zeitalter, as well as Three Sisters, Homo Faber and Midsummer Night’s Dream by Stefan Pucher. She also performed in Falk Richter’s production of The Clinic and The Presidents by Miloš Lolić. She also sang one of the main roles in the opera I.Q. by Enno Poppe with the famous Klangforum Wien orchestra, directed by Anna Viebrock.

Katja Kolm has also worked with the choreographer Meg Stuart, as well as with Karin Henkel, Christiane Pohle, Stephan Müller, Robert Borgmann, Volker Lösch, Andreas Kriegenburg and many others. Katja Kolm has appeared in many radio plays and readings, including with Ethan Hawke. In film, too, she is not restricted to any particular type of role. She was nominated for the Austrian Film Award in the category ‘Best Female Supporting Role’ for the historical role of Madame Paradis in the film The Light by Barbara Albert. She played the female lead Sonja, the lover, in the Swiss film Der Sohn meines Vaters by Jeshua Dreyfus; the murderess in Murderesses by Pepe Danquart; and Fräulein Rottweiler in the Swiss action comedy Mad Heidi by Johannes Hartmann and Sandro Klopfstein. Katja Kolm also appeared in Dani Levy’s series The Sheikh and worked with Hannu Salonen and Urs Egger, among others.