Christoph Schlingensief

Christoph Schlingensief
ORF interview in Vienna, October 2009
Born	Christoph Maria Schlingensief (1960-10-24)24 October 1960 Oberhausen, West Germany
Died	21 August 2010(2010-08-21) (aged 49) Berlin, Germany
Occupation	Director

Christoph Maria Schlingensief (24 October 1960, Oberhausen – 21 August 2010, Berlin) was a German theatre director, performance artist and filmmaker. Starting as an independent underground filmmaker, Schlingensief later staged productions for theatres and festivals, often accompanied by public controversies. In the final years before his death, he staged Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival and worked at several opera houses, establishing himself as a Regietheater artist. He posthumously won the Golden Lion for Germany in 2011 at the Venice Biennale for the best national pavilion, which was turned into an installative replica of the stage design for his autobiographical play "A Church of Fear VS. the Alien Within", alluding to his cancer illness.

Schlingensief was born on 24 October 1960 in Oberhausen. His father was a pharmacist and his mother a pediatric nurse. As a child, he worked as an altar server and already made short films with a hand-held camera.

Having passed his Abitur exams, he twice failed to gain admission to the University of Television and Film Munich. From 1981 he studied German language and literature, philosophy and art history at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, but also dabbled as a musician and finally dropped out in 1983 to work as an assistant to the experimental filmmaker Werner Nekes. After working as a teacher at Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, he became a production manager on Hans W. Geißendörfer's TV series Lindenstraße.