Joana Mallwitz

Born in 1986 in Hildesheim, Joana Mallwitz began playing the violin and piano at the age of five. At thirteen, she was admitted as a junior student to the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hanover, where she studied with Christa-Maria Hartmann and Karl-Heinz Kämmerling; she later studied conducting with Martin Brauss and Eiji Oue. Mallwitz received her first permanent engagement in 2006 at the Theater Heidelberg. In 2014, she was appointed General Music Director in Erfurt, and in 2018 she took up the same position at the Staatstheater Nürnberg. She stepped down from that post in 2023 to assume the roles of Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Konzerthausorchester Berlin. Mallwitz performs regularly with the world’s leading orchestras. She made her debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2023, conducted the Vienna Philharmonic for the first time in 2024, and debuted with the Berliner Philharmoniker in 2025. She has also appeared with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Orchestre de Paris, and the Orchestre National de France. Her operatic work has taken her to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Bavarian Staatsoper, the Semperoper Dresden, the Royal Opera House in London, and the Salzburg Festival, where in 2020 she became the first woman to conduct a major opera production there, appearing with Mozart’s Così fan tutte; she returned in 2022 with The Magic Flute. In 2026, she took charge of the opera productions at the Baden-Baden Easter Festival for the first time, collaborating with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra on Wagner’s Lohengrin. An exclusive artist with Deutsche Grammophon, she received the Opus Klassik Award in 2025 for The Kurt Weill Album. Named Conductor of the Year by Opernwelt in 2019, she has also received the Bavarian Order of Merit and the Federal Cross of Merit. In 2024, the documentary Joana Mallwitz — Momentum was released in cinemas.

May 2026