During the 2025-26 season at HGO, Nicola Panzer serves as the co-director for Messiah. Previously for the company, she co-directed Turandot (2022) and Parsifal (1992). Panzer has worked as an independent opera director since 1998 and serves as guest director at Hamburg State Opera. She has directed productions for LA Opera, De Vlaamse Opera in Antwerp, the Royal Ballet and Opera – Covent Garden, Teatro Real Madrid, Opéras Châtelet and Bastille in Paris, as well as the festivals in Salzburg, Bayreuth, and Spoleto. She has directed for many international theaters including Montpellier, Bologna, Moscow, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, São Paulo, and Perm. She staged Stockhausen’s Aus den sieben Tagen and five productions in the Seria Opera Piccola at the Hamburg State Opera; Hansel and Gretel at Konzerthaus Dortmund; Riders to the Sea and The Abduction from the Seraglio in Frankfurt; The Bartered Bride at the Landestheater Linz; Nabucco at the Opera Festival Immling; Les Mamelles de Tirésias in Leipzig; The Elixir of Love in Rostock and The Marriage of Figaro, The Barber of Seville, and The Magic Flute for the Daejeon Spring Festival, South Korea. Since 1997, Panzer has held diverse lectureships at the universities for music and theater of Frankfurt, Hamburg, Leipzig, Essen, and Rostock. Her collaboration with Robert Wilson started with Cosmopolitan Greetings (1988), a multimedia jazz opera with music by George Gruntz and Rolf Liebermann based on text by Allen Ginsberg, and with Parsifal (1991), both in Hamburg. Recently she worked as co-director on Luther – Dancing with the Gods in Berlin; Le Trouvère at Verdi Festival Parma; “H – 100 seconds to midnight” at Thalia Theater Hamburg; and Messiah at Mozart Week in Salzburg and Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris. She studied music directing with Götz Friedrich at Hamburg’s Academy of Music and Performing Arts.