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Victoria Stevens is known for her inventive stagings that place a contemporary reading of the text and intense physical engagement at the forefront. She directed the world premiere of the contemporary opera Nero Monologues for London's inaugural Opera in the City Festival and made her Italian directing debut with Le nozze di Figaro at the New Generation Festival in Florence. For her production concept The Turn of the Screw (Britten), she was awarded 2nd prize at Opera Europa/Camerata Nuova’s biennial

 European Opera Directing Competition at the Royal Danish Opera. A directing contract with the Staatsoper Hannover followed, where she premiered Philip Glass’s The Fall of the House of Usher in 2022.

Among her 2024 projects in Germany, Victoria directed and conceptualised new productions of Otello (Verdi) for Staatstheater Mainz and Die Fledermaus at the Wilhelma Theater in collaboration with the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart. For the main stage of the Nationaltheater Mannheim, Victoria has directed Händel's Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno,  A Christmas Carol and Hänsel und Gretel, the latter as part of the White-Wall-Opera series, a socially-distanced performance solution to the COVID pandemic. A passion for devised physical theatre and the fusion of opera with mixed media established itself in early work. Victoria is a strong proponent of socially-engaged theatre as artistic activism, as epitomized in her recent staging of Jonathan Dove's The Monster in the Maze for the Theater Heidelberg-- a participatory opera for near 200 children, teenagers, opera chorus and operatic soloists on the theme of war and migration. She was a Director-in-Residence for the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence Women Opera Makers workshop mentored by Katie Mitchell, as well as projects at La Monnaie,  Operosa Festival in Belgrade  and the Opera Forward Festival at the Dutch National Opera. She enjoys a longterm collaboration with set designers Anna-Sofia Kirsch and Basia Bińkowska, cinematographer Lukas Eicher and costume designer Charlotte Werkmeister.

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As assistant director, Victoria has worked with the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, Arena di Verona, Teatro Regio di Parma, Teatro Verdi di Salerno, Grand Théâtre de la Ville de Luxembourg and the Dutch National Opera. As Staff Director at the Nationaltheater Mannheim from the Season 18/19, she assisted, among others, Calixto Bieito, Barrie Kosky, Barbora Horakova and Jossi Wieler and revived productions of La Bohème, Il trovatore, Norma and Eugene Onegin. 

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Victoria was born in Cape Town, South Africa. She has a Masters Degree in Stage Direction and Dramaturgy from the Verona Accademia per l'opera Italiana, where she studied under Rossini specialist Pier Luigi Pizzi, Gianfranco de Bosio and Cecilia Gasdia. She has a Masters in Opera Performance from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's Alexander Gibson International Opera School, where she was the ABRSM Scholar, and a Bachelor of Western Classical Music (Hons) from the University of Cape Town. She has performed as a soprano with Cape Town Opera, the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra, Oxford Lieder Festival, Schleswig-Holstein Musikfestival and the Richard Wagner Society of South Africa. Her training and instinct as a singer inform her directing voice and facilitate an immersive approach to working with singing actors.

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Victoria is based in Mannheim, Germany.

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