Olga Shaishmelashvili

Born in Leningrad, Olga Shaishmelashvili graduated from the State Academy of Art and Design in Saint Petersburg in 2002. Since 2011, she has been working as a freelance costume and stage designer for musical theatre, dance and drama at many important theatres in Russia, such as the Mikhailovsky Theatre in St Petersburg and the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, as well as internationally. Engagements have taken her, for example, to the Ruhr Festival, the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Theater Basel, Hessische Staatstheater Wiesbaden or the Lithuanian National Theatre for Opera and Ballet in Vilnius. She has also worked for the Theater an der Wien, the Saarländisches Staatstheater Saarbrücken, the Deutsche Oper Berlin and the Budapest State Opera, among others. She regularly collaborates with the directors Evgeny Pisarev and Vasily Barkhatov. For the latter she designed a large number of costume designs, including "Khovanshchina" (Mussorgsky), "The Gambler" (Prokofiev), "Madama Butterfly" (Puccini) and "The Dead City" (Korngold). She was also Barkhatov's costume designer for the world premiere of Reimann's opera "L'Invisible", Puccini's "La fanciulla del West", Zimmermann's "Die Soldaten", Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin", Gounod's "Faust" and Verdi's "Simon Boccanegra", among others.
The collaboration with Vasily Barkhatov continued at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein: Olga Shaishmelashvili is responsible for the costume design for Wagner's "Der fliegende Holländer".