Marcus Lobbes is Director of the Academy for Theater and Digitality, the sixth division at Theater Dortmund. He has also worked as a director, stage and costume designer, and author in opera and drama, including premieres and first performances, at many well-known theaters and opera houses. Since 2014, he has been regularly invited as a guest lecturer at various colleges and universities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

As director of the Dortmund Academy, Lobbes is in demand locally, nationally and internationally in lecture and discourse formats; an important concern for him is the development and encouragement of a wide variety of networks for the performing arts, as well as the communication of artistic research in correspondence with the latest technologies to theater and educational institutions, politics and the public.

The Dortmund Academy is a globally unique model project for digital innovation, artistic research and technology-oriented training and further education for all genres of the performing arts. The focus is to explore how digital tools could be implemented on, in front of and behind the stage. Under Lobbes’ direction, the Academy is working on artistic-technical research, prototypical development, application-related testing, practical advice, cultural-political discourse formation, and networking on a regional, national, and international level.