Krystyna Meissner (1933–2022) – theatre director, manager, and international festival curator. She graduated in Polish philology from the University of Warsaw (1956) and in directing from the Warsaw State Theatre School (1962). She made her debut at the Ateneum Theatre in Warsaw, staging the Polish premieres of plays by Ghelderode, Pinter, and Mrożek. For a decade she worked with the Polish Theatre in Warsaw, where she created, among others, a celebrated production of “The Morality of Mrs. Dulska” with Nina Andrycz. She directed in theatres across Poland—from Białystok to Wrocław—bringing both classical and contemporary drama to the stage.
She was the general and artistic director of the Kruczkowski Theatre in Zielona Góra (1980–1983), the Horzyca Theatre in Toruń (1983–1996), the Stary Theatre in Kraków (1997–1998), and the Wrocław Contemporary Theatre (1999–2012). Her body of work includes dozens of productions, notably the award-winning “Life Is a Dream” by Calderón in Rzeszów, “Balladyna” in Toruń, Mayakovsky’s “The Bedbug” in Elbląg, and her acclaimed “…for instance, Mayakovsky” in Wrocław.
Between 1983 and 1989 she directed the Festival of Northern Poland Theatres in Toruń, which in 1991 she reshaped into the International Theatre Festival “Kontakt”—a platform for meeting and exchange between Eastern and Western theatre. After a brief and turbulent tenure at the Stary Theatre in Kraków, she took over the Wrocław Contemporary Theatre, where in 2001 she founded the International Theatre Festival DIALOG-WROCŁAW. Its subsequent outstanding editions firmly established the position of Polish theatre worldwide and made Meissner one of the most influential figures in European theatre in the early twenty-first century.
For her artistic and curatorial work she received numerous awards and distinctions, including the Polityka Passport, the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta (2005), the Lithuanian Cross of the Knight “For Merits to Lithuania” (2006), the Dutch “Space To Take Place” award (2008), the Gloria Artis Medal (2009), and the Goethe Medal—Germany’s highest cultural distinction (2014). She was a member of the Informal European Theatre Meeting and served three times as a juror for the European Theatre Prize.
Krystyna Meissner remains one of the most significant figures in Polish and European theatre at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries—a director and cultural leader who combined bold artistic vision with the determination and passion to build international bridges through theatre.
