Kirsten Dawes South Africa / Germany← Back to list

Kirsten Dawes is Artistic Director to Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal, where she programs approximately 140 concerts per year. She takes particular pleasure in ignoring musical genre definitions and helping musicians and audiences to build a relationship of mutual trust and curiosity. Kirsten studied Music and German Language and Literature at the University of Cape Town and History at Uppsala University before moving to Berlin in the early 2000’s. Here she freelanced as, among other things, a dramaturge for the education department of the Berliner Philharmoniker before moving to Frankfurt to manage projects and develop new formats together with the musicians of the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, and then to Bremen, where she spent seven years in the Artistic Planning and Touring Department at The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. This was followed by a year as Head of Programming at the Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern before she joined the team at the Pierre Boulez Saal in July 2016, about eight months before the hall opened.