Vanessa Valk

Born in 1974 as the daughter of a Hamburg general manager and a Dutch computer scientist, she broke off her medical studies to study puppet theater at the Stuttgart University of Music and Performing Arts. She toured Europe with her award-winning solo work “Seule au Bain” (director: Frank Soehnle).
From 2006 to 2011 she was permanently engaged at the Freiburg Theater and has been working as a freelancer since 2011. She directs, builds puppets in her own workshop and works as a puppeteer and actress at various city and state theaters as well as in free companies.
In her own projects, Valk deepens the reflection on the relationship between humans and animals and deals intensively with questions about origin and homeland, also prompted by the training as a systemic consultant (2017 to 2020 at the tandem institute Freiburg).
She has twice won the Stuttgart Theater Prize, the Grand Prix for solo puppeteers (Lodz, Poland) and the Prize for Special Theater Forms (Bielsko Biala, Poland).
She has two children and lives with her husband, the set designer Jens Burde, in Freiburg. Both were awarded the Freiburg Reinhold Schneider Prize in 2020.