Cornelia Krafft - artistic director, set & costume designer
was born in Munich, Germany, in 1972. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria. Krafft taught at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna for ten years before coming in 2009 as a visiting professor to the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut (AUB), where she continued as an Assistant Professor until January 2015. With an DAAD scholarship she lived in Berlin and taught at the University of Arts Berlin (UDK). To this day she continues her work as an artist in Lebanon, the Middle East and throughout Europe.
January 2020 she moved her center of life and practice to Vienna again, to work for different production houses for feature-, documentary- and commercial films.
Krafft’s work as an artist and choreographer has received broad local and international coverage with reviews in various print media and broadcasts in news media. In the past years her in depth practice and research explored mute movement, dance, design and space in relation to the social, political and cultural fabric.
She was invited to lecture and give workshops about her expertise at the University of Applied Arts -Vienna, The Theater Akademiet Norway, The University of Arts Berlin and the University of Arts London. Krafft's art has been showcased in Vienna, London, Munich, Berlin, Venice, Beirut,Prague and Pomorie, Bulgaria and in Bundanon, Australia. In Lebanon, her installations, paintings, photography, and films were showcased at Gallery Janine Rubeiz, at the Musée Sursock Salon d’Automne XXX & XXXI and is part of the permanent collection of MACAM (Modern and Contemporary Art Museum).
Her publication “MUTE MOVEMENTS – a collective performance art journey through Beirut, 2009-2014”,sponsored by the AUB Presidents Club was published by AUB Press in March 2015. In June it was first internationally launched in Prague at the Prague Quadrennial for Performance Design and Space (PQ2015) where Krafft was also one of the artists to represent Lebanon at its first participation.