Kirill Serebrennikov

Biography

Kirill Semyonovich Serebrennikov (Russian: Кирилл Семёнович Серебренников; born 7 September 1969; Rostov-on-Don) is a Russian stage and film director and theatre designer. Since 2012, he has been the artistic director of the Gogol Center in Moscow. He has been described as one of Russia's leading theatre directors.

Serebrennikov was born in Rostov-on-Don, Russian SFSR to a Jewish father and a Ukrainian mother. Having graduated from Rostov State University with majors in physics in 1992. Serebrennikov had no formal theatre education prior to his stage director debut in 1994. He went on directing music videos and commercials. In 2001, he staged his first production in Moscow. Serebrennikov has staged drama productions in Moscow Chekhov Theatre, Latvian National Theatre, Theatre of Nations. He has been active in opera staging productions for the Mariinsky Theatre, and the Bolshoi Theatre in Russia, where he has also been a stage director and a designer for a ballet, Komische Oper Berlin and Stuttgart Opera in Germany. Serebrennikov is one of the artistic directors of Territory Festival in Moscow. Since 2008, he is a professor of the Moscow Art Theatre School, where he has a class of actors and directors. His films have been screened at Cannes Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival, Rome Film Festival, and the Warsaw International Film Festival where his film Yuri's Day received the Grand Prix.

In 2012, he was appointed artistic director of The Gogol Center. On 23 May 2017, Serebrennikov's apartment and the Gogol Center facilities were raided by law enforcement agencies in connection with an alleged embezzlement at the Seventh Studio, a non-profit organization established by Serebrennikov. While no charges against Serebrennikov have been filed, some of Russia's most prominent cultural figures saw the publicized raid of his apartment as a political gesture, discouraging Serebrennikov and others from criticizing the government. (Serebrennikov had criticised the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and has spoken out in support of Russia’s LGBT community.) On 22 August 2017, Serebrennikov was detained by the Investigative Committee of Russia, suspected of masterminding a fraud scheme involving a state subsidy the Seventh Studio received from the government of Russia from 2011 to 2014. In a verdict condemned by the Human Rights Watch, Serebrennikov was convicted in June 2020, fined, and given a suspended sentence. Despite being in a supposed house arrest in Russia, Serebrennikov arrived to Hamburg in January 2022.