Prof. Nanouk Leopold

Nanouk Leopold is a Dutch film director and screenwriter. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam and from the Dutch Film Academy in Amsterdam. Her debutfilm Îles Flottantes was selected for the IFFR Tiger Competition in 2001. Guernsey was selected for the Quinzaine at Cannes in 2005. Wolfsbergen premiered at the Forum of the Berlinale 2007 and was selected for TIFF in the same year. Brownian Movement premiered in Toronto in 2010 and had its European premiere at the Forum in Berlin in 2011. In 2013 It’s all so quiet was the opening film of the Berlinale Panorama Special. In 2018 Cobain had its world premiere at the Berlinale in the Generation section. Her latest feature film Whitetail premiered in Toronto last year.

Nanouk became a member of the Society of the Arts of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences in 2016. In 2017 she directed her first play, From the Life of the Marionettes, an adaptation of the film by Ingmar Bergman, for the prestigious Amsterdam theatre group ITA, at the invitation of Ivo van Hove. In 2019 she directed The Homecoming by Harold Pinter for ITA.  Nanouk made her debut as an opera director with Der Zwerg by Alexander Zemlinsky at the Dutch National Opera, which was the opening of the season and the presentation of new chief conductor Lorenzo Viotti. Her theatre debut in Germany, with a piece by Alice Birch (Normal People/Dead Ringers) called Anatomy of a Suicide, for the Berliner Ensemble, premiered in October 2021. And in 2023 Nanouk directed the world premiere of the play Phädra, in Flames, written by Nino Haratischwili, also at the Berliner Ensemble.

Nanouk also makes video installations together with visual artist Daan Emmen (www.leopoldemmen.nl). A selection: Early 2021 they finished an installation for the Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam as part of the group exhibition Vive le Cinéma, together with Lucretia Martel, Carlos Reygadas, Jia Zhang-ke and Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese to mark the 75^th anniversary of the Filmmuseum and the 50^th anniversary of the International Film Festival Rotterdam. They had their first international solo exhibition in 2022 in the Oval Office in Bochum with Another Woman, an installation made in cooperation with Sandra Hüller, Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods and Gillis Biesheuvel, which played in an extended version at the Art Institute TENT, in the Netherlands in 2023. In 2025 they showed their work at the Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin. At this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam they will premiere with an art installation in the programme Art Directions. And a solo exhibition is planned in Marres, House for Contemporary Culture, Maastricht for 2027.

Nanouk is currently working on her new feature film A Different Pace.