Katarzyna Minkowska

Born in 1992, she is a theatre director and one of the leading representatives of the young generation of Polish directors. She mainly writes prose and stage plays inspired by authors such as Kuncewicz, Orwell and Ottessa Moshfegh.

Header picture

Picture size

extra large (default)

Podpis obrazka (umieszczony pod zdjęciem)

Katarzyna Minkowska, photo: Dawid Zuchowicz/AW

Text positon (deprecated)

Center

Katarzyna Minkowska attended music school and studied stage design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, but it was in theatre that she found full artistic freedom. However, she also continues to express herself through stage design, creating sets for her own productions.

She made her directorial debut with the play Stream at TR Warsaw as part of the TR Debut competition, the annual winner of which is selected during the Forum of Young Directors in Kraków. In Stream, Minkowska – together with playwright Tomasz Walesiak, who would become her permanent collaborator – combined Greek mythology with contemporary digital reality, taking Internet broadcasts and video blogs as a starting point. The premiere in October 2020 was preceded, among other things, by the online character development project R.I.P. KORE, which she called a ‘laboratory for theatre in the digital age’ and which also exemplifies how performing arts functioned during lockdown.

Scenes from a dress rehearsal for 'The Stranger' by Katarzyna Minkowska at the Polish Theatre in Poznań, 2024, photo: Agata Rucińska/Polish Theatre

In December of the same year, still under pandemic conditions, Minkowska produced The Mousetrap, based on a short story by Agatha Christie. This interactive project by the Horzyca Theatre in Toruń was staged interactively via Zoom, allowing viewers to engage with the performance online.

The artist gained wider recognition in October 2021 with The Stranger, an adaptation of an interwar novel by Maria Kuncewicz, at the Polish Theatre in Poznań. The performance was enthusiastically received by both critics and audiences (reviews included comments about a standing ovation). Paweł Dobrowolski wrote in the pages of Teatr magazine that the director had ‘valorised the compromised concept of bourgeois theatre’, while Mike Urbaniak proclaimed that the Poznań performance ‘will probably appeal to all those who appreciate so-called artistic theatre and those who prefer so-called “theatre for the people”’. In 2024, The Stranger, directed by Minkowska, was also realised in a new Television Theatre production under the direction of Michał Kotański.

"Orlando. Bloomsbury" directed by Katarzyna Minkowska [gallery]

Embeded gallery style

display gallery as slider

Scene from 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation' by Katarzyna Minkowska, based on the novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, translated by Łukasz Buchalski, 2022, photo: Monika Stolarska/Dramatyczny Theatre in Warsaw

This appreciation for psychology on stage and the disenchantment of the ‘theatre for the people’ format would become a hallmark of Minkowska’s later work. In May 2022, the People’s Theatre in Kraków premiered the play 1984: Ministry of Love, inspired by George Orwell’s famous novel and part of the international PLAY ON! project, which encourages implementing video game mechanisms into theatre narration. With a script by Piotr Froń, the play’s audience acted like a group of jurors who could influence the dramaturgy of the play by casting their votes using a mobile phone application. Just a month later, audiences in Kraków were invited to see Minkowska’s next show. The National Old Theatre staged Orlando: Bloomsbury, a play based on the work and biography of Virginia Woolf, announced as a ‘theatrical landscape’ and based on improvisations by its ensemble of actors. In turn, the play My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a staging of Ottessa Moshfegh’s famous novel, opened at Warsaw’s Dramatyczny Theatre during the first season under its director Monika Strzępka (a season whose motto was ‘Therapy for All’). Premiering in December 2022, the play told the story of a young woman who decides to sleep through a year of her life with the help of pharmaceuticals. The plot, constructed by Moshfegh, was framed by Minkowska as a performative exhibition, with the fate of the sleeping heroine becoming a kind of conceptual action within the performance – before the start, the protagonist (played by Izabella Dudziak) would go to sleep in a bedroom set up in a transparent container in front of the Dramatyczny building on Plac Defilad. My Year of Rest and Relaxation was almost unanimously described by critics as effective psychological theatre (sometimes as ‘theatre of the middle’). It constituted a surprising opening to the new controversial direction planned by Strzępka, who had announced the introduction of a feminist revolution at the Dramatyczny.

"My Year of Rest and Relaxation" directed by Katarzyna Minkowska [gallery]

Embeded gallery style

display gallery as slider

Prose was also the basis of Faustus (premiere June 2023), based on the novel by Thomas Mann using excerpts from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. This was Minkowska’s next production at the Polish Theatre in Poznań after The Stranger. Later, in the winter of 2024, the artist returned to the place of her debut, presenting When the Snow Melts at TR Warsaw – an adaptation of her own script, created in partnership with Walesiak, which tells the story of a family the day after one of its members commits suicide. In an interview with Magdalena Dubrowska, the director said that the play captures ‘the liminal state in which one cannot yet construct in one’s head the thought that what has happened has happened’. Wanda Świątkowska, a member of the Artistic Commission of the 30th National Competition for the Exhibition of Polish Contemporary Art, wrote in her review that When the Snow Melts is ‘a precise mechanism that brings the viewer into the intimate world of the family’.

In April 2024, the Kochanowski Theatre in Opole premiered The Tempest: Island Regulations based on Shakespeare’s final play. It was Minkowska’s first directorial encounter with the great playwright as well as her first collaboration with playwright Jan Czapliński. ‘Although Shakespeare’s original lines are used sparingly, his characters and the structure of his text have been preserved,’ explained Czapliński about their adaptation.

In 2024, Minkowska was given the Golden Prologue distinction for young artists by the committee of the Zygmunt Hübner ‘Man of the Theatre’ Award. She also received a scholarship from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage’s ‘Young Poland’ programme.

Originally written in Polish, translated by Patryk Grabowski in May 2025.

contemporary polish theatre directors

contemporary polish theatre

contemporary polish theatres

maria kuncewiczowa