Karin Henkel, born 1970 in Cologne and raised in Lübeck, started as assistant director at the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden and the Wiener Burgtheater. There she initially worked as an assistant to George Tabori, and from 1994 also as a director. From 1996 onwards she directed at the Schauspielhaus Bochum with Leander Haußmann, since 1997 she has worked at almost all major German-speaking theatres such as Schauspiel Stuttgart, Schauspiel Köln, Thalia Theater Hamburg, Schauspiel Frankfurt, Münchner Kammerspiele, Schauspielhaus Zürich, Deutsches Theater Berlin and Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg. Her productions have already been invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen seven times. In 2014 her production Amphitryon und sein Doppelgänger (Schauspielhaus Zürich) was voted "Production of the Year" by the trade journal Theater heute. In 2018 she was awarded the Berlin Theatre Prize of the Stiftung Preußische Seehandlung for her extraordinary services to German-language theatre. With her staging of Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald, Karin Henkel returns to the Schauspielhaus Bochum in 2019 after 16 years as a director.

Past roles: