Australian theatre director Barrie Kosky was BOTD in 1967. Born in Melbourne to a middle-class Jewish family of Belarusian, Hungarian and Polish origin, he was introduced to classical music and opera by his Hungarian grandmother. He began acting in school productions in his teens, directing his first play at 15, then studied music history and piano at the University of Melbourne. After graduating, he directed stage plays and operas in Melbourne, and formed the Gilgul Theatre Company. At 29, he became the youngest director of the Adelaide Festival, and also undertook a series of productions for the Sydney Theatre Company. In 2001, he was appointed co-artistic director of the Schauspielhaus Wien in Vienna, becoming well-known for his energetic and creative re-imaginings of the classical repertoire, inserting Cole Porter songs into Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppaea) and presenting Shakespeare‘s Macbeth with an all-female cast. In 2012, he became the artistic director of Berlin’s Komische Oper, a position he held until 2022. He became internationally famous for his live-animation version of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), inspired by silent films from the 1920s. In 2017, he became the first Jewish director invited to the Bayreuth Festival, staging a production of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Master-Singers of Nuremberg). He has saved some of his most radical productions for London’s Royal Opera House (along with barbed criticisms about Britain’s under-funding of the arts). His 2016 production of Shostakovich’s The Nose, featuring bearded ladies, the protagonist stripped to his underwear and a troupe of giant tap-dancing noses, delighted audiences but put many critics’ noses out of joint. In 2017, he re-staged Bizet’s Carmen as a Weimar Republic cabaret, dressing Carmen in a pink toreador’s outfit and an ape suit, while his 2019 revival of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld featured can-can dancers wearing Swarovski crystal-studded penises and vaginas. Described somewhat predictably as opera’s new enfant terrible, he preferred to call himself a “gay Jewish kangaroo”. In 2023, he mounted a highly-praised revival of Francis Poulenc‘s Dialogues des Carmélites for Glyndebourne Opera, and has embarked on a three-year production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle for the Royal Opera House. Openly gay since forever, he lives in Berlin. His relationship status is unknown.