Olaf A. Schmitt has been artistic director of the Kasseler Musiktage festival since 2016, and works as a freelance dramaturg. He is also artistic advisor to the Bregenz Festival, where he was engaged as a dramaturg from 2014 to 2019.
He studied theatre, film and media (with Hans-Thies Lehmann) and musicology in Frankfurt am Main. From 2005 to 2008 he was concert dramaturg at Theater Heidelberg, going on to be a dramaturg at the Bavarian State Opera until 2013. Guest engagements as a dramaturg have taken him to the Cologne Opera, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Theater an der Wien, the Opéra de Lyon and the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. He has strong working partnerships with the directors Martin Kušej, Johannes Erath, Barrie Kosky and Nikolaus Habjan and with the composer Miroslav Srnka, and has also worked with Stefan Herheim, Elisabeth Stöppler, Saar Magal and Mariame Clément, among others.
Since 2014 Olaf A. Schmitt has taught dramaturgy on the set and costume design course at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, and since 2022 also at the Weißensee Academy of Art in Berlin; he has also taught on the dramaturgy and music theatre / opera singing courses at the Bavarian Theatre Academy in Munich and on the arts administration course at the University of Zurich.
He contributed to the Heiner Müller-Handbuch (2003) and co-edited AufBrüche – Theaterarbeit zwischen Text und Situation (2004). He has contributed numerous texts to a variety of publications, among them Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart and the Handbuch der Oper. He has lectured at universities including those of Bamberg, Bayreuth, South Carolina and Minnesota.
