Maarten van der Duin

After graduating from Leiden University in Slavic Languages and Soviet Studies, Van der Duin completed a director's internship at the Ludwik Solski Academy for the Dramatic Arts^[1] and studied Polish at the Polonia Research Institute ^[2] of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland. After two years, Van der Duin left for Russia to study directing at the State Institute for Theatre Arts (GITIS)^[3] in Moscow. In his second year of study he switched to The Moscow School of Dramatic Art of renowned director Anatoly Vasiliev. After his studies, Van der Duin staged theatre plays between 1996 and 1997 at the Moscow State Drama and Comedy Theatre in Noginsk^[4][5] and the Yakutsk State Academic Drama Theatre in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia).^[6]

In 1998, Van der Duin produced a festival of Russian classics at the King's Head Theatre,^[7] London, for which he translated two Russian plays into English (The Suicide by Nikolai Erdman and Maria by Isaac Babel) and also directed the latter.^[8] Apart from that, he did an internship at the English National Opera and the Dutch National Opera, and assisted director Hans Croiset of theatre company Het Toneel Speelt. Until 2003, Van der Duin participated as an assistant director in multiple opera productions at the Dorset Opera Festival in Sherborne,^[9] England. Nearly every summer since 2016, he directs operas, that are subsequently performed by conductor Stephen Ellery at festivals in Cardiff, Brighton, Frome and London. La serva padrona by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi in 2016 was followed by La Zingaretta^[10] by Leonardo Leo in 2017 and Bastien and Bastienne by Mozart and the Coffee Cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach in 2018.