BIO

Set designer of Slovak descent living in Warsaw for 25 years. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava and Amsterdam, he has worked for many years with the largest opera theaters in the world.

Since 1995 he has been associated with the Grand Theater – National Opera. First as an associate and assistant to Andrzej Majewski, then as chief stage designer. It was then that Kudlička’s distinctive style began to take shape, characterized by minimalist composition, reaching for unobvious materials in the theater space or means of expression belonging to other fields, such as visual arts, film, visual arts, design. Since 1996, he has been independently creating set designs primarily for opera performances.

He successfully collaborates with leading opera theaters and festivals in the world, including. With the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Royal Opera House in London, the Festival of Aix-en-Provence, the Théatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, the Staatsoper Berlin, the Washington Opera, the Los Angeles Opera, the Welsh National Opera in Cardiff, the Theater an der Wien, Tokyo Bunka Kaikan, the Opera du Rhin in Strasbourg, the Semperoper in Dresden, the San Francisco Opera, Oper Frankfurt, the Royal Opera in Stockholm and Copenhagen, the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg or the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden. He is invited by world-renowned directors for his opera projects.

Boris Kudlička’s professional interests are not limited to opera. Among other things, he co-designed the Polish pavilions at the Expo in Hannover in 2000 and in Shanghai in 2010. An important place in his work is occupied by exhibition and design activities. He collaborated on the design of the permanent exhibition at the Fryderyk Chopin Birth House in Żelazowa Wola. At the National Museum in Warsaw, he designed two important exhibitions: Guercino. Triumph of the Baroque. Masterpieces from Cento, Rome and Polish collections and Brescia. Renaissance in Northern Italy. Moretto-Savoldo-Moroni. Raphael-Titian-Lotto. He designed the new interiors of the Raffles Hotel of Europe, the Belvedere restaurants in the Royal Łazienki Park and the Epoka in Warsaw, as well as private residences.

He is the recipient of many awards and honors. In 2005, the Theater Institute awarded him a prize for his production design for Richard II at the National Theater. In 2025, he was awarded the Gold Medal “Meritorious to Culture Gloria Artis” by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage. He was twice honored with the Slovak Dosky Theater Award. He also won the Gold Medal twice (2007, 2015) at the Prague Quadriennale, and was its general curator in 2011. In 2023, he was nominated for the International Opera Award in the designer category and received an award from the Slovak Minister of Culture for his exceptional contributions to the field of theater scenography on major opera stages. He received a doctorate in fine arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2014.