Tatjana Gürbaca, born in Berlin, is living in her home town. She studied opera direction at Berlin’s Hochschule für Musik „Hanns Eisler“. Her studies of music, drama and dance were extended by master courses especially with​ Ruth Berghaus. She joined the Graz Opera as a directorial assistant 1998-2001.

Competing for the Ring Award Graz, she was amongst the prized winners. Her directorial debut was Turandot at the Graz Opera. She has worked as a free lancing artist ever since. Her stylistic variety include all epochs of opera, from Purcell, Handel, Hasse, Kraus and Haydn to Hartmann, Dallapiccola, Ligeti, Reimann and Sciarrino. 

Mozarts Così fan tutte, inaugurating the Lucerne season in 2004, set one of the early highlights of her career, matched by an outright contemporary Don Giovanni in Bremen in 2019. Being trained both as a theatre maker and as a musician, Tatjana Gürbaca easily transposes historical settings and conflicts into contemporaneity. 

Tatjana Gürbaca has worked all over Europe, reaching far out to Bogotá and Novosibirsk, but Germany remained central to for her artistic work. Two highlights led beyond its borders. With Claudio Abbado as her partner, she staged a semi-scenic version of Fidelio at the Lucerne Festival in 2010, and Antwerp’s Vlaamse Opera was the house to present Parsifal in 2013. For this production Tatjana Gürbaca won international recognition as Director of the Year. 

Exemplified with Parsifal, Wagner’s musical dramas are Tatjana Gürbaca’s major challenges. She directed Der Ring des Nibelungen by condensing the four titles into a trilogy at the Theater an der Wien in 2017. It is the „second generation“, namely Hagen, Siegfried and Brünnhilde, tob e placed into the center of the cycle.

Having served the State Theatre Mainz as opera director for some seasons, Tatjana Gürbaca concentrated her work on some favored houses. In Zurich she has staged Rigoletto, Aida, Die Zauberflöte, La finta giardiniera, and, highly acclaimed, Werther. Tatjana Gürbaca will open the next season with Boito’s Mefistofele in Amsterdam.