Born in Berlin in 1968. After his technical training at the Berliner Ensemble and the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, since 1992 has been working as a lighting designer at the Residenztheater in Munich, the Burgtheater in Vienna, the State Operas in Hanover, Hamburg and Vienna, the Schauspiel Hanover, at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London, the NNT Tokyo, La Scala in Milan and the Salzburg Festival and other; his most recent engagement has been in 2018 for Lydia Steier’s production of Die Zauberflöte. From August 2007 to 2020, Olaf Freese was a permanent lighting designer at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin.

Among the productions he has worked on are Phaedra (director: Peter Mussbach, stage: Ólafur Elíasson), Un ballo in maschera (director: Jossi Wieler/Sergio Morabito), Eugene Onegin (director: Achim Freyer), Lohengrin (director: Stefan Herheim), Die Entführung aus dem Serail (director: Michael Thalheimer) and Helmut Oehring’s AscheMOND oder The Fairy Queen (director: Claus Guth) at the Berlin State Opera; Shakespeare’s Macbeth (director: Calixto Bieito), Der Freischütz (director: Falk Richter), Rusalka (director: Wieler/Morabito), Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (director: Herheim), and Fidelio (director: Guth) at the Salzburg Festival; Dialogues des Carmélites (director: Nikolaus Lehnhoff) and La traviata (director: Johannes Erath) at the Hamburg State Opera; Der Rosenkavalier (director: Herheim) at the Stuttgart Opera; Der Rosenkavalier (director: Anselm Weber) and Pelléas et Mélisande (director: Lehnhoff) at the Aalto Theater Essen; Tannhäuser (director: Guth) at the Vienna State Opera; Faust I, Faust II and Oresteia (director: Thalheimer) at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin; Eugene Onegin (director: Herheim) at the Netherlands National Opera in Amsterdam; Traetta’s Antigona (director: Vera Nemirova), Il trovatore and Orpheus in the Underworld directed by Philipp Stölzl as well as Der Freischütz (director: Thalheimer) at the Staatsoper im Schiller Theater in Berlin and Salome (director: Guth) at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. In 2016, he developed the lighting concept for Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Thursday from the Light cyclus at the Theater Basel, directed by Lydia Steier.

Olaf Freese teaches courses in lighting design at the HfBK Hamburg and Dresden.