Małgorzata Szczęśniak Set designer

Season 23/24 Artist – Season 24/25 Artist

Set designer, creator of the sets and costumes for all of Krzysztof Warlikowski's productions, Małgorzata Szczęśniak has co-created Warlikowski's poetic language in theatre and opera. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków in 1972, and then studied Psychology at the Jagiellonian University, from 1972 to 1976. 

At the same time, she has run art classes for hyperactive children and participated in an art therapy project for schizophrenia patients. In 1981, while writing her doctorate thesis on the psychology of creativity, she started studying Set Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and graduated in 1984. She then decided to dedicate herself to theatre and moved to Paris with Krzysztof. Together, they staged their first production in 1992. 

Małgorzata Szczęśniak has also collaborated with many Museums: the Exhibition of Young Stage Designers in Katowice in 1994, the Prague Quadrennial in 1990 and in 2007, "Reality of transformation - transformation of reality” at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. In the spring 2008, she held a solo set design exhibition in Brussels: “Appearing and Vanishing without a Trace”. She created the stage design for the exhibition "Opera World" at the Centre Pompidou Metz in 2019 and for the exhibition "Around Us a See of Fire. The Fate of Jewish Civilians During the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising" for the Polin Museum in Warsaw. Małgorzata Szczęśniak is the artistic leader of the architectural project of Nowy Teatr, an interdisciplinary cultural centre in Warsaw. 

She was awarded Best Set Designer of the Year at the 2021 Opera Awards.

At the Paris Opera: Iphigénie en Tauride, 2006 ; The Makropulos Affair, 2007 ; Parsifal, 2008 ; King Roger, 2009 ; Le Château de Barbe-Bleue / La Voix humaine, 2015 ; Don Carlos, 2017 ; Don Carlo, 2019 ; Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, 2019 ; A Quiet Place, 2022 ; Hamlet, 2023.