Jun.-Prof. Theda Nilsson

Born in Landskrona, Sweden. T.B. Nilsson studied architecture at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen and the Berlin University of the Arts. Since 2004 she has worked as a director, author and stage and costume designer in German-speaking countries. Professor at the HfBK Dresden since 2020, Theda Nilsson is based in Berlin with her partner and collaborator Julian Wolf Eicke.

Theda Nilsson's theatrical installations move at the interface between theatre, visual arts and performance and are conditioned by unusual theatrical experiences of time and space in elaborately designed spaces that are fine-tuned down to the smallest detail - constructions of distorted and deformed architecture.

With the production "MEAT", a 240-hour non-stop performance for the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, she and her partner established themselves as an artist duo in the German theatre scene in 2014.

One of her best-known projects is the triptych "Cellar Door" for the Schauspielhaus Wien, 2016. Fragments of seven single-family houses in the Austrian province, inhabited by 40 performers*, were the generator for an online platform created for the project, which took the artist's work beyond the physical boundaries of the installation into darker realms of the virtual world.

In search of new linguistic spaces, Nilsson realised the 21-day installation "Dekameron" at the Berliner Ensemble in summer 2018, in which Giovanni Boccaccio's 100 tales of late medieval novella collection were reinterpreted and realised by the actors* of RambaZamba Theatre. At the Wiesbaden Biennale in August and September 2018, she showed the work "Betreutes Leben - Ezzelino Live Cams", whose world spanned between film set, live chat and website.

A fundamental part of Nilsson's work is the collaboration with other artists. Her productions are often created together with video artists, filmmakers, hair artists and photographers. The choice of performers plays a decisive role in the development of her work. They also come from a wide range of backgrounds and bring different experiences to the work.  

Theda Nilsson composes her ensemble anew as a composition of professional performers and other people with diverse social and professional backgrounds. The performers are not the focus of interest as representatives of certain social groups, but rather the work on an artistic cosmos.