"You have often surprised us with theater pieces you thought up yourself, for which you instructed your classmates to play."

(Mrs. Pongratz, excerpt from the certificate of class 2a, 1996)

Everyone starts small, without exception. Born in Verl in 1987, my path led me through Disney's The Lion King and later Cameron's Titanic, initially into the visual arts. Why? Drawing like Jack Dawson seemed to me to be a much cheaper hobby at the age of 12 than trying a blockbuster.

After two art exhibitions, however, I finally learned at a cinema festival that a film does not necessarily have to last two hours. And so I invested in a small camera and shot my first short film when I was 16. Other projects that I realized during and sometimes instead of school followed. My teacher then put the gun on my chest: Do you want to make films or do you want to graduate from high school? My answer was clear... and yet, after an extra round in 2008, I graduated from high school. Then I sat in on both the Hans Otto Theater in Potsdam and the Theater Bielefeld and worked on various film productions in Cologne.

From 2010 to 2017 I studied directing at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, completed the “Hollywood Workshop” masterclass at the University of California Los Angeles in 2016 and the “Comedy Series” masterclass at Network Movie in Berlin in 2019.

But because you rarely have time for rehearsals when it comes to film, I also work as a freelance video director for theater, opera and musicals in addition to developing my own material.