Thomas Mika

Director, set and costume designer Thomas Mika studied opera directing at the Hamburg University of Music and Theater. In 2006, he created his first set design for the Berlin State Ballet.
That same year, he presented his first opera production, Bizet’s “Carmen,” with the ensemble Escritura Hamburg. In recent years, his directing credits have included Lehár’s “The Count of Luxembourg” at the Estonian National Opera, as well as Tchaikovsky’s “Iolanta” and Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel” at the Landestheater Salzburg. In the 2026/27 season, Thomas Mika will stage Puccini’s “Tosca” at the Großes Festspielhaus in Salzburg.
The focus of Thomas Mika’s work lies in the field of dance, where he has collaborated with contemporary choreographers such as Alejandro Cerrudo, Martin Chaix, Edward Clug, Dominique Dumais, Marco Goecke, Jae Man Joo, Andrey Kaydanovskiy, Jack Lister, Trey McIntyre, Sofia Nappi, Juliano Nunes, Kevin O’Day, Martin Schläpfer, and Jeroen Verbruggen.
In the classical repertoire, he created the sets for “Onegin” and “Romeo and Juliet” by John Cranko, “La Dame aux Camélias” by Derek Deane, “Don Quixote” in the versions by Alexey Fadeechev and Nina Ananishvili, “Romeo and Juliet” by Ben Van Cauwenbergh, “Romeo and Juliet” by Lauren Lovette, as well as “Swan Lake” productions choreographed by Thomas Edur and Eno Peci.
He works at venues including the Opéra National de Paris, La Scala in Milan, the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, the Vienna State Opera, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Zurich Opera House, the State Theaters in Stuttgart, Darmstadt, and Wiesbaden, the English National Ballet, the San Francisco War Memorial Opera, the Wortham Theater in Houston, the Harris Theater in Chicago, the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing, the Hong Kong Cultural Center, the Seoul Arts Center, the LG Art Center in Seoul, the National Theater in Mannheim, the Hanover State Opera, the Aalto Theater in Essen, the Musiktheater im Revier in Gelsenkirchen, the Hungarian, Polish, and Estonian National Operas, the Novosibirsk State Opera, the Croatian National Theater, and the Royal Opera Houses of Antwerp and Ghent.