The Flemish director Guy Cassiers (Antwerp, 1960) is one of Europe's top theatre directors. After studying printmaking at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Cassiers chose to continue his career in the theatre. Starting out as artistic leader at the Oud Huis Stekelbees in Ghent, where he set up theatre projects for children and young people, he went on to work as a freelance director for a while before taking the job of artistic director at the Rotterdam RO Theater in 1998. There he progressively stepped up the integration of multimedia in the theatre with productions such as Lava Lounge and the opera The Woman Who Walked into Doors. The highlight of his time at RO Theater was undoubtedly his Proust Cycle (Holland Festival 2005), for which he was awarded the Amsterdam Prize for the Arts in 2005.

As well as Proust's masterpiece, Cassiers put many other novels onto the stage at the RO Theater, including Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Bezonken Rood by Dutch writer Jeroen Brouwers and Hersenschimmen by Brouwers' compatriot Bernlef. In 2006, Cassiers moved to Antwerp to take over at Toneelhuis, where he started to focus on the complex relations between art, politics and power in his work, as exemplified in his Triptiek van de macht and his trilogy based on Robert Musil's monumental novel The man without qualities (Holland Festival 2012). At this time, music started progressively to play a bigger role in his productions. He directed two operas in 2009, House of the Sleeping Beauties and Adam in ballingschap, and he took on Wagner's Ring in Berlin and Milan between 2010 and 2013. Cassiers' staging of Virgina Woolf's Orlando (2013) was selected for the Dutch Theatre Festival. His Hamlet vs Hamlet, with a script by Flemish writer Tom Lanoye, was also selected for this festival as well as the Flemish Theatre Festival. Together with Ivo van Hove, Guy Cassiers received an Honorary Doctorate for General Merit from the University of Antwerp in 2014.