Swedish artistic director of Marionetteatern at the Stockholm City Theatre since 1999. Helena Nilsson was accepted at this theatre as a trainee in the 1980s where she learned puppet theatre’s every profession: actor, puppeteer, puppet builder, and set designer, before she started to direct productions and finally become the theatre’s artistic director when Michael Meschke retired in 1998.

Helen Nilsson’s first works as a stage director in the 1990s proved her qualifications as a creative force of the crossover forms of contemporary puppet theatre developed to an advanced artistic level for young audiences. Among her notable productions are two plays by Swedish children’s book writer Ulf Stark: Kan du vissla Johanna? (Can You Whistle, Johanna?) and Systern från havet (The Sister from the Sea). As artistic director of Marionetteatern, Helena Nilsson has broadened the repertory, inviting to the company American stage director Roman Paska for August Strindberg’s Ett drömspel (A Dream Play), a Japanese manga artist for a production with actors and comic strip scenery, and authors and playwrights such as Barbro Lindgren and Martina Montelius for other productions.  

(See Sweden.)