Benjamin Burgunder

Benjamin Burgunder, born in Switzerland, found an unusual route into the world of theatre in Hamburg – as a trained chef and qualified fashion designer. From there, he worked as a freelance costume designer until 2021, bringing his visual worlds to life on stages throughout the German-speaking world and beyond. He then returned to his Swiss hometown of Basel, where, alongside the stage, he increasingly discovered the medium of film for himself – most recently with the mini-series »Teberberi«, broadcast on srf.

His work has taken him to venues such as the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Theater Osnabrück, Theater Lüneburg, the Semperoper Dresden, the Teatro Arriaga in Bilbao, the Stadttheater Klagenfurt and the Prague State Opera – and time and again back to his roots at the Theater Basel and the Vorstadttheater Basel.

His long-standing artistic partnerships have been particularly influential: with Johanna Zielinski «Oh Mary!», «Voyager», «Schlaf!», Ron Zimmering «Nähe», «Bandscheibenvorfall», «Hamburger Menetekel», Barbora Horáková Joly «Dido and Aeneas», «Lear», Franziska Autzen «Im Menschen muss alles herrlich sein», «Die Ärztin» and Friedrich von Mansberg «Jesus Christ Superstar», «Love Never Dies». At the Vorstadttheater Basel, he has been responsible for all productions under the direction of Matthias Grupp since 2021.

He remains creatively active offstage too: for the Château electro festival in France, he collaborated with the collective l'équipe de plaisir to design a dancefloor set on the theme of »Alice in Wonderland«. And since 2024, he has come full circle, returning to where his training began: he organises the Vorstadttheater bar and leads its team. As a trained chef, he is increasingly seeking connections between the worlds of theatre and gastronomy, with a view to bringing the thematic worlds of an event to life on a culinary level and enabling audiences to immerse themselves more deeply in them. At Theater & Orchester Heidelberg, Benjamin Burgunder will be designing the costumes for the world premiere of Anne Münch’s »Die Anhörung« in the 2026/27 season.