The Belgian writer and director Lisaboa Houbrechts has a career that straddles theatre and opera. Houbrechts trained at the School of Arts Ghent and made her name with productions including The Goldberg Chronicles (2014) and The Winter’s Tale (2016). Music often plays a significant part in her productions, her work incorporating everything from Bach to hip hop.
An increasingly prominent figure on the European scene, she made her German stage debut with Orfeo ed Euridice at the Hanover State Opera last year. Recent years have seen her tackling the great female characters of the canon with productions of Euripides’ Medea for the Comédie-Française in Paris and Yerma at Dramaten in Stockholm.
Her production of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage premiered at KVS in Brussels earlier this year in a co-production with Toneelhuis in Antwerp, where she has been part of the artistic management team since 2022.
According to Le Soir: “Houbrechts’ production gives this manifesto about the absurdity of war and the opportunism of a capitalist system in which economic interests are placed above human values a terribly topical contour.”
She just opened a production of Elektra at the Saint Gallen Konzerthaus in Switzerland and she’s increasingly in demand with other international productions in the pipeline." In September 2025, Lisaboa Houbrechts will be a guest at the third International Fosse Festival in Oslo, where she will direct Winter by Nobel laureate Jon Fosse.
Besides Lisaboa Houbrechts, Łukasz Twarkowski, Nina Rajić Kranjac, Mario Banushi and Fritzi Wartenberg are also tipped.
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Lisaboa Houbrechts in the top five up-and-coming directors to watch in 2025
The UK art magazine The Stage turns the spotlight on Lisaboa Houbrechts as one of five directors making waves across European stages
"The theatre scene on the continent boasts a number of exciting young directors with the most promising careers ahead of them. Natasha Tripney turns the spotlight on some of those already making waves across European stages and sometimes beyond. Who are the young directors currently making waves in Europe? Who are the names causing a stir at the box office and getting festival programmers excited?