Artist in Focus:
Katie Mitchell

With this edition of the festival, we are once more placing an outstanding artist in the spotlight: British director Katie Mitchell is the Artist in Focus at FIND 2026. She has been resident director at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court Theatre and she regularly presents plays at the National Theatre in London, where she was also part of the artistic management. She has directed numerous opera and theatre productions across Europe and beyond and has received multiple awards. Her work is characterised by an innovative interlinking of acting, scenography and live video.
Thematically, she explores canonical texts from a feminist viewpoint, generating inventive shifts in perspectives. She has been engaged in an ongoing collaboration with the Schaubühne ensemble since 2010. As part of the festival, we are presenting a stage adaptation of the prose text »Bluets« by American author Maggie Nelson, adapted by Irish playwright Margaret Perry, in which the protagonist explores her obsession with the colour blue and her pain over a lost love.
Mitchell’s latest production, »Cow | Deer«, which she developed with writer Nina Segal and sound designer Melanie Wilson, entirely dispenses with words: four performers deploy sounds and noises to narrate a day in the life of a cow and a deer. In this work, Katie Mitchell continues her exploration of nature, the environment and climate issues, offering a glimpse into a world beyond human perspectives. The soundscape is created live, allowing the audience to hear the world as an animal perceives it. This focus is complemented by Mitchell’s production of »Orlando« – a queer biography spanning four centuries of human history, adapted by Alice Birch from Virginia Woolf’s novel.

At FIND 2026, she is the artist in focus, with three productions. In conversation with Joseph Pearson, she offers insight into her theatre practice, her various forms and directorial approaches, as well as the political, social and artistic questions that preoccupy her.