Haitham Assem Tantawy

Biography Highlights

Haitham Assem Tantawy is an Egyptian-German opera and music-theatre director known for visually powerful, physically intense, and ritual-inspired productions. His work explores opera as a transformative space where sound, body, and image merge into emotionally charged theatrical experiences. He gained international recognition with his acclaimed production of The Lighthouse at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, which led to his nomination as Director of the Year in the Opernwelt Critics’ Poll 2024/25.

In the 2024–25 season Tantawy directed The Lighthouse (Der Leuchtturm) by Peter Maxwell Davies at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, a production praised by critics as a “breathtaking Gesamtkunstwerk” and nominated for Opernwelt Director of the Year. Since the 2022/23 season he has been working at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf and Duisburg as a staff and assistant director, collaborating with leading international opera directors on major productions.
His Wagner-inspired chamber opera Wider das Verlöschen, supported by the Richard Wagner Association in Karlsruhe and the Wagner Society of Santiago de Chile, is currently featured on the RIWA 26 platform celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Bayreuth Festival. Earlier, in 2019, he directed and wrote the libretto for the world premiere of Das Ebenbild & Der alte Traum by Kyungjin Lim and Tingting Pang at the Spieltriebe Festival at Stadttheater Osnabrück; the production later became a central case study in Anna D. Rüdel’s book Staging Interreligious Differences (2023). In the same year he worked as movement director for Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia at the Nederlandse Reisopera.
Between 2019 and 2022, while studying opera directing at the Karlsruhe University of Music, he directed scenes from Puccini’s La Bohème in a masterclass with Peter Konwitschny and a reduced version of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. He is also the founder and artistic director of SINAI Orchestral Theatre in Berlin, through which he has created publicly funded music-theatre productions such as Preludes and Yusuf’s.