Franck Evin
Biography
The lighting designer Franck Evin was born in Nantes, France. At the age of 19, he went to Paris to study the piano. At night he accompanied singers at the Café-Théâtre Le Connétable and developed an interest in lighting. Thanks to a scholarship from the French Ministry of Culture, in 1983 he became assistant lighting master at the Opéra de Lyon, where would he work with Ken Russell, Robert Wilson and other stage directors. He started working as an independent lighting designer at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus in 1986 and passed the master lighting designer exam in 1993. This was followed by productions in Nantes, Strasbourg, Montpellier, Paris, Lyon, Bochum, Vienna, Bonn, Brussels and Los Angeles. Since the 1995/96 season, he has been Artistic Director of the lighting department of the Komische Oper Berlin, where he has been responsible for all new productions, primarily partnering the directors Andreas Homoki, Barrie Kosky, Calixto Biet and Hans Neuenfels. He has also worked with David Alden, Sebastien Baumgarten, Guy Coutance, Willy Decker, Richard Jones, Peter Konwitschny, Harry Kupfer, Uwe Laufenberg, Stephen Lawless, Yuri Lyubimov, Jetske Mijnssen, etc. He has been a guest at opera houses in Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Munich and Graz, as well as at the Opéra national de Paris, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, La Scala, Teatro La Fenice, Vlaamse Oper, English National Opera, Bayreuther Festspiele, etc. Since 2012, he has been working under Andreas Homoki as Artistic Director of the lighting department at the Opernhaus Zürich. In March 2006, he was awarded the German OPUS theatre prize in the lighting design category. In 2010, ZDF Theaterkanal broadcast a documentary about the work of the lighting designer with a portrait of Franck Evin as the 12th episode of Die Theatermacher series.