JESSICA KARGE is a child of a theater family from East Berlin and learned how to make theatre costumes at the Berlin State Opera House. She assisted internationally well known costume designers at the Burgtheater in Vienna and The Salzburg Festival before creating her own first works at Vienna in 1989. From 1993 to 1997 she mainly designed costumes for drama productions in Switzerland and was subsequently employed as head costume designer at the Maxim Gorki Theatre at Berlin. Between 2005 and 2009, under the directorship of Uwe Eric Laufenberg, she worked mainly at the Capital Theater, Hans Otto, at Potsdam (Brandenburg), where she also designed the costumes for the opening of the new theater grand house. Her further career took her to many German-speaking theaters, mainly for drama productions: Akademietheater Wien, Deutsches Theater Berlin, Schauspielhaus Zürich, Berliner Ensemble, Staatstheater Wiesbaden, Deutsches Theater Göttingen and others. Since 1993 she also works for opera productions: La Monnaie Brussels (Ariadne auf Naxos), Semperoper Dresden (Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk), Komische Oper Berlin (Boris Godunov), Gran Teatre del Liceu Barcelona (Der Rosenkavalier), Staatstheater Wiesbaden (Il trittico), The Bayreuth Festival (Parsifal, 2016). Die lustige Witwe is her first work for the Latvian National Opera at Riga.
Photo: Karl-Bernd Karwasz