Lotte van den Berg is a theatre and film director. Even as a young girl she was fascinated by theatre and would follow the work of her father, theatre director Jozef van den Berg, from the wings. After a brief period at university, she went on to study theatre direction in Amsterdam. She then became a freelance director working with a number of Flemish and Dutch companies and for several years she was attached to Toneelhuis in Antwerp. In 2005 she made a play set in Antwerp prison, Begijnenstraat 42, for Toneelhuis; she worked as a director on (among other things) Josse De Pauw’s project Volk; she revived the site-specific project Het blauwe uur (2005) and staged a gripping site-specific play, Braakland (2005) inspired by the work of Coetzee. In 2006 Lotte van den Berg joined Guy Cassiers and his group of six theatre-makers. As part of that constellation, she made the subtle play Stillen (2006) and the controversial Winterverblijf (2007). Another site-specific project Gerucht followed in the spring of 2007.

Over the years she has won a number of prizes, including the Erik Vos Prize and the Charlotte Köhler Prize and she has been invited to stage her work at various national and international festivals. Many of Lotte van den Berg’s productions are about looking, about real-life experiences and, often, about the difficulty of understanding. With her keen eye for telling details and seemingly unstudied gestures, she is able to capture situations between people so convincingly that the audience recognizes them and embraces them passionately. Moreover, Van den Berg moves between the worlds of dance, theatre and film and thus creates a highly individual, open style which invites the public to view her work from different perspectives. She works with professionals and non-professionals, on location and in theatres, drawing inspiration from what is happening around us in daily life.

At the beginning of 2009 her work entered a new phase. She left Toneelhuis and became artistic director of a new structure called OMSK, which was based in Dordrecht in the Netherlands. She continued her artistic adventure within that new structure with a number of actors and artists gathered around her. New encounters and long, group trips abroad became a regular part of OMSK’s approach. For instance, 2010 took Lotte van den Berg and co. to Kinshasa. She produced an account of her experiences there and on her return to the Netherlands in Les Spectateurs (2011). Her most recent play Pleinvrees (2012) was also staged in Antwerp. At the end of 2012 OMSK moved from Dordrecht to Utrecht, where Lotte van den Berg took up residence in Het Huis, together with other like-minded theatre-makers, including Boukje Schweigman and Dries Verhoeven. She is making a brief return to Toneelhuis in June 2013 with the film Een oefening in sterven, her contribution to Mokhallad Rasem’s one-night project Wachten. At the same time Lotte van den Berg is working on various language versions of Pleinvrees, under the title Agoraphobia, which will travel internationally in 2013 and 2014.

You can follow Lotte Van den Berg's work here.