Scholarships for young musical theater talents

The content on this page was translated automatically.

The Akademie Musiktheater der Deutschen Bank Stiftung (AMH) has announced the new scholarship holders for its leadership program. With Eunhye Joo and Chin-Hsien Chung, two female composers from the HfMT will be honored. Maike Graf (dramaturgy) and Stefan Czura (directing) from the Theaterakademie will also be included in the program.

The AMH scholarship is a two-year interdisciplinary leadership program - specially tailored to young talents from seven areas of musical theater.

Vitae

Chin-Hsien Chung (Composition)
Born in 1996 in Chiayi, Taiwan. She is a contemporary music composer whose work explores sonic narration and social structures at the intersection of sound, language and memory. She works on toys as an instrument in contemporary music theater; the guiding idea is the aesthetics of childishness. Her works have been performed at the Staatstheater Kassel, by Ensemble Musikfabrik, at the International Ensemble Modern Academy IEMA, by Ensemble Ascolta, by the JACK Quartet, by the Curious Chamber Players, at the Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik and as part of the Kasseler Musiktage. She is currently studying for a doctorate (Dr. sc. mus.) at the Hamburg University of Music and Drama, where she passed her concert exam in composition under Prof. Dr. Gordon Kampe. She completed her master's degree at the Cologne University of Music and Dance under Prof. Miroslav Srnka. Her works include the orchestral piece "Binding Bonding", the operas "Leonce und Lena", "Waiting for Godot - Lucky's Speech", "Voci", "Vom Verschwinden vom Vater" and the music theater piece "The Invisible Wall". She was a DAAD and Kunststiftung NRW scholarship holder.

Eunhye Joo (Composition)
Born in 1996 in Seoul, South Korea. Her short opera "Just saying" was premiered in 2025 and her operetta "A perfect date" in 2024 at the Hamburg University of Music and Drama. In 2024, her opera "How to die in 29 Minutes" premiered at the Staatstheater Kassel. Her works have been presented at international festivals, including the Darmstadt Summer Courses (2018, 2023), the neuköllner originaltöne festival (2021, 2022), the Klangwerkstatt Berlin (2021, 2022), the Schwetzingen SWR Festival (2023), the outHEAR New Music Week (2024) and the Virtual Brass Academy (2025). She has worked with ensembles such as Ensemble Recherche, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Ascolta, Ensemble Linea, mdi ensemble and others. She has been a permanent member of ENSEMBLE SONOR XXI since 2018 and her works are published by BabelScores. From 2015 to 2019 she studied composition at Hanyang University in South Korea and from 2020 to 2023 she completed her master's degree with Prof. Sidney Corbett at the Mannheim State University of Music and Performing Arts. Since 2023 she has been studying "Concert Exam Composition" at the University of Music and Drama Hamburg with Prof. Dr. Gordon Kampe.

Maike Graf (libretto/text)
Born in 1996 in Gräfelfing, Munich. She is a freelance librettist and dramaturge. Her libretti include contemporary operas, children's operas, spoken theater, performances and participatory, immersive productions. Her texts have been composed by Helena Cánovas Parés ("Penelope. A Study in Waiting", 2022), Christopher Collings ("VENTIL - A Station Music Theater with Bicycle Tour", 2023), Mischa Tangian ("Morgen sehe ich mich", 2022) and Marta Kowalczuk ("König Jammer und Bruder Froh", 2025), among others. Influenced by her bachelor's degree in philosophy and musicology as well as her time in the master's program "Music Journalism", her texts are mostly based on scientific and interview-based research. They oscillate between socio-critical realism, feminist fiction and contemporary language play. As a dramaturge, she focuses primarily on premieres and rewrites. She has worked with directors such as Eva-Maria Baumeister, Carmen C. Kruse and Chris Grammel. She is currently studying for a Master's degree in "Music Theater Dramaturgy" at the Hamburg University of Music and Drama.

Stefan Czura (Director)
Born in Wangen in the Allgäu. The director, dramaturge and curator studied theater and media studies as well as French Romance studies at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. He has been studying music theater directing at the Hamburg University of Music and Drama since 2022 and will complete a master's degree in music theater dramaturgy there from October 2025. After working as an assistant at the Bavarian State Opera, the Bayreuth Festival, the Opéra national de Paris, the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence and the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, where he worked with Tobias Kratzer and Lydia Steier, among others, his first dramaturgies took him to the Staatstheater Darmstadt. In 2020, he reached the semi-finals of the "Ring Award" and won the audience award for his "Don Giovanni" concept. Having grown up between a mountain idyll and a small town, he develops his artistic language in the field of tension between tradition and new beginnings. His music theater projects revolve around forms of immersive and transcending music theater - a search for utopian spaces in which music, body and myth merge. He is particularly interested in operetta.