Isabella Sedlak (she/her) is a director and author living in Berlin and Vienna.

She completed two degrees in Theatre, Film and Media Studies as well as International Business and Social Sciences in Vienna (AT) and Southampton (GB). At the same time, she continued her trainings in education, became a coach for group dynamics and social competence, worked with disadvantaged young people and co-founded a feminist centre for girls* in Vienna, where she was head of the creative and media department. As a musician and singer, she has regularly performed in front of audiences and in recording studios. After gaining experience in film and television in Austria and England and longer stays in London, Colombia and Mexico, she has been working mainly in theatre since 2013.

She assisted at the Deutsches Theater and Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin and worked closely with directors such as Yael Ronen, Lola Arias and Sebastian Nübling. She co-directed several productions with Ersan Mondtag and appeared on stage as a performer herself in one of his shows. In a very international environment, she gained extensive experience in the field of scenic and autofictional writing, as well as the use of multilingualism on stage and during the rehearsal process.

 

Her first own plays were presented at renowned theatres in Germany, Austria and Sweden and invited to festivals (such as Berliner Herbstsalon). In 2019, she was honoured with a young talent award. In the same year, she founded a collective called Bauer+Baum, with which she realised projects in the independent theatre scene in Vienna.

Her productions are characterised by collective processes. They are created as piece developments in multiple languages or on the basis of new drama by authors such as Anna Gschnitzer, Dino Pešut, Miroslava Svolikova or Anaïs Clerc. Her working method is characterised by close collaboration with artists from diverse disciplines such as Shahrzad Rahmani (Guerilla Architects), the video collective Hand mit Auge, Nicole Marianna Wytyczak and Raissa Kankelfitz. She likes to experiment with spaces that require new ways of acting, languages, audience situations and perspectives. Music and sound are central to all of her works. Some of which are at the interface between installation, performance and classical stage play. For the most part, however, her works stands out by a particular passion for the precise development of characters, which is why her directing style has often been classified as ‘post-post-dramatic theatre’