Born 1957 in Wiesbaden, she studied stage design with Achim Freyer from 1978 to 1983 and attended Dieter Schnebel’s lectures in experimental composition at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Berlin. Subsequently she was a stage direction and stage design assistant at the opera houses of Brussels, Cologne, Oslo and Paris. Since 1986 she has freelanced in the fields of staging, spatial and costume design. Stage design for productions including Aribert Reimann’s Melusine at the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz, Munich; Verdi’s Rigoletto (director: Brigitte Fassbaender), Oper Chemnitz; Strauss’s Rosenkavalier (director: Peter Lund), Staatstheater Darmstadt; Händel’s Ariodante (director: Achim Freyer), Oper Frankfurt and Liceu Barcelona. Stagings since 2000 include Mozart’s Idomeneo, Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz Munich; Buxtehude’s Das jüngste Gericht at the Rheingaufestival and Händel’s Saul.

Since then, she has concentrated on collaboration with contemporary composers and, in that connection, on the creation of spaces and settings for new forms of music theater, musical installations, and abstract spatial contexts for music. For instance, from 1986-1992 she worked with Gérard Grisey on his composition Le Noir de l'Étoile (performances in Brussels, Strasburg, Huddersfield and Berlin) and from 1996-1999 with Peter Ablinger on his Weisse Litanei and Nerz und Campari (performances in Berlin, Cologne, Vienna). Since 2000 she has been engaged in an ongoing collaboration with Klaus Lang on works including kirschblüten.ohr. (MaerzMusik, Berlin, 2002), fichten. (Steirischer Herbst, Graz, 2006 and MaerzMusik, Berlin, 2007), the moon in the moonless sky.(two.) (Philharmonie Luxembourg, 2007), architektur des regens (Munich Biennale, 2008), buch . asche (Oper Bonn, 2010). In addition, she has also created spatial stagings for a number of instrumental works, including Marcelo Toledo’s The Jungle Within (Radialsystem, Berlin, 2010); Wolfgang Rihm’s choral work Vigilia (Chorwerk Ruhr, Essen Cathedral, 2009); Lucia Ronchetti’s Albertine for voice and whispering audience (MaerzMusik, Berlin, 2008). Together with Beat Furrer and his composition students at the Hochschule für Musik in Frankfurt am Main, she created a new work for music theater titled Mond.Finsternis.Asphalt, which was performed in 2010 at the Bockenheimer Depot in Frankfurt.

Current projects: together with Toshio Hosokawa, she created singing garden (music by Hosokawa and Vivaldi, space and light by Claudia Doderer), commissioned by the Akademie für alte Musik Berlin for Radialsystem Berlin, where it was performed in September 2011. She is designing the opera Alessandro to be premiered in 2012 on the opening night of the Händel-Festspiele in Karlsruhe. She will be an artist in residence at the Villa Aurora in California in 2012.

Claudia Doderer lives in Berlin.

“… Claudia Doderer is always concerned with the open form: in her work with the operas of the repertoire, as well as in collaboration with composers, spatial as well as musical realization are of equal value. She composes the space, researches and tries out possibilities that enable the space to be experienced, by exposing its visual implications, for instance, or by translating specific perspectives and proportions through altered positioning. Every space that she designs, she shapes anew …” (Sabine Sanio)