Biography
Dr Olivia Maria Schaaf is a Berlin director and theatre scholar. She has staged productions at the Neuköllner Oper and the Komische Oper in Berlin, the Stratmanns Theater in Essen and the Whittemore Theatre Vermont in the USA, among others. She developed the event project #GEMEINSAMBUNT in 2019 in cooperation with the contact persons for LGBTIQ+ of the LKA Berlin. Since 2021, she has been teaching music history and theatre studies in the Musical/Show course at the University of the Arts. Schaaf completed her doctoral thesis at Queen Mary University of London. Her research examines the musical in the German-speaking cultural sphere as well as the cultural-political, sociological and socio-economic distribution of values within the expressive spectrum of the performing arts, with a special focus on the definitional basis of U (entertainment) and E (seriousness) in musical theatre.
In 2024/2025, she will stage the Carpendale musical »Hello! Again?« at the Musikalische Komödie.