Milo Rau (ch)

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Milo Rau, born in 1977 in Bern, is a director, author, and since the 2018/19 season, the artistic director of NTGent (Belgium). Rau studied sociology, German studies, and Romance studies in Paris, Berlin, and Zurich, among others, under Pierre Bourdieu and Tzvetan Todorov. Since 2002, he has published over 50 plays, films, books, and actions. His theater productions have been showcased at major international festivals such as the Berliner Theatertreffen, Festival d’Avignon, Venice Biennale, Vienna Festival, and the Brussels Kunstenfestivaldesarts, touring more than 30 countries worldwide.

Milo Rau has received numerous awards, including the 3sat Prize in 2017, the Saarbrücken Poetics Lectureship for Drama in 2017, and, in 2016, the prestigious ITI Prize of World Theatre Day, following Frank Castorf and Pina Bausch, as the youngest artist. In 2017, he was voted Director of the Year in a survey by the German Stage, in 2018 honored with the European Theatre Prize for his life's work, and in 2019, he became the first artist ever appointed Associated Artist of the European Association of Theatre and Performance – EASTAP. In 2020, he was awarded the renowned Poetics Lectureship in Münster for his overall artistic work. His plays have been selected as the best of the year in critic surveys in over 10 countries. In 2019, he received an honorary doctorate from Lund University in Sweden, and in 2020, an honorary doctorate from Ghent University.

In September 2020, his book "Why Theatre?" was published, in which Rau invited 100 leading intellectuals and artists from around the world to answer this question. Milo Rau has been a guest at the Vienna Festival several times, most recently in 2019 with "Orest in Mosul" and in 2020 with Kay Sara's online performance "Against Integration". Since July 2023, Milo Rau has been the artistic director of the Wiener Festwochen. In 2023, his essay "Reclaiming the future"  on the power of art and the will to make a difference was published.