Brigitte Reiffenstuel won the 2013 Oscar della Lirica award for achievement in costume design at the International Opera Awards.
She made her LA Opera debut with Madama Butterfly in 2016. Born in Munich, she studied at the London College of Fashion and St Martin’s School of Art. Her costume designs in the UK include: for the Royal Opera House: Falstaff (also La Scala and De Nederlandse Oper), Adriana Lecouvreur (also Barcelona, Vienna and Opera de Paris), Faust (also televised, Opera de Lille, Monte Carlo, Trieste, Valencia) and Elektra; for English National Opera: Lucrezia Borgia, Peter Grimes (also Oviedo, De Vlaamse Opera and Deutsche Oper, Berlin), Tosca, The Damnation of Faust, Faust, Lucia di Lammermoor (also Goteborg Opera, Washington National Opera and Canadian Opera) and Boris Godunov; for Glyndebourne Festival Opera: Giulio Cesare (also Chicago Lyric Opera and Opera de Lille); for Opera North Rigoletto and Il Trovatore (also Opera Ireland).
In Europe and the rest of the world she has designed costumes for Falstaff, Giulio Cesare and Un Ballo in Maschera (Metropolitan Opera), Don Giovanni ( La Scala), The Pearl Fishers and Madama Butterfly (Santa Fe Opera), Peter Grimes (Deutsche Oper Berlin), Il Trovatore (Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago), Don Carlos (Frankfurt Opera), Billy Budd and The Makropulos Affair (Lyric Opera of Chicago), Lulu (Bavarian State Opera), Semele (Théâtre des Champs-Elysées); Macbeth (Houston Grand Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opera North), Maria de Buenos Aires (Teatro Nacional de Sao Carlos), Sarka, Maria di Rohan (Wexford Festival), Parsifal (Graz), Tamerlano (Komische Oper Berlin), The Tales of Hoffmann (De Vlaamse Opera, Antwerp; also televised), Salome, Boris Godunov (Staatstheater Stuttgart), Eugene Onegin (Mannheim), Peter Eötvös’s Three Sisters (Dusseldorf Opera), Werther, Alpha and Omega (New Israeli Opera, Tel Aviv), Verdi Season ( Hamburg) and The Queen of Spades (Zurich). Future plans include designing costumes for Kate Bush’s forthcoming tour and La Rondine (Deutsche Oper Berlin).
