We are saddened by the news of Lithuanian theatre director Eimuntas Nekrošius’ passing away on 20 November 2018. The recipient of the 16th Istanbul Theatre Festival’s Honorary Award and the Festival’s guest with Othello in 2006 and Faust in 2008, the esteemed director will always be remembered with great respect in Istanbul and the whole world.

Eimuntas Nekrosius was born in 1952. He graduated from the Lunacharski Institute of Theatre Art in Moscow (1978). From 1978 to 1979 he worked at the State Youth Theatre in Vilnius, from 1979 to 1980 - at Kaunas Drama Theatre. Since 1980 he resumed work at the State Youth Theatre in Vilnius. All productions by Nekrosius were given awards of various theatre festivals in Lithuania and the Baltic States. They have successfully participated in many international theatre festivals, while Nekrosius is a winner of numerous state awards in the field of arts. During 1991-97 Nekrosius has worked as a resident director of the Lithuanian International Theatre Festival( LIFE). In 1994 Nekrosius received a special prize from the Lithuanian Theatre Union as Director of the Year, and an award from the Baltic Assembly for Mozart and Salieri with Don Juan and Plague as the best theatre performance in the Baltics. In the same year the European Theatre Union and Taormina Arts Committee (Italy) awarded Eimuntas Nekrosius a prize of the New European Theatre Realities.

Since 1998 Nekrosius has been working as the artistic director of Meno fortas theatre studio, which was also established in 1998. Performances Nekrosius has recently directed include William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1997), Macbeth (1999) and Othello (2000); Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (2000), Ivanov (2002) and The Cherry Orchard (2003); L. Desiatnikov’s The Children of Rosenthal (2005); J.W. Goethe’s Faust (2006); R. Wagner’s Valkyrie (2007); Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (2008) and N. Rimsky and Korsakov’s The Legend of Invisible City of Kitez (2008).

Nekrosius has been the recipient of many prestigious national and international awards including Lithuanian Theatre Union Prize for the best director of the year (1994 and 1998), the Art Prize of The International Baltic Assembly (1994), the Best Director’s prize of the Baltijskij Dom Festival, St. Petersburg, Russia (1995), The Golden Mask (Moscow) Prize for the best foreign performances shown in Russia (1997, 1999 and 2004), the prize for the best performance of the Kontakt Festival, Torun, Poland (1999), prizes for the best performance and the best director of the Mess Festival, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (2001), the International K. Stanislavsky Fund Premium, Moscow, Russia (2001), the special journalists and theatre critics Golden Mask Prize for the best performance staged in Russia (2004), award from the Italian Critics Association for the best foreign performance shown in Italy (2007) and finally the UBU Prize with “Faust” (2008).