Eline Arbo
Eline Arbo has been artistic director of ITA since September 2023. Before that, she joined ITA in 2022 as Associate Artistic Director.
At ITA, Arbo has directed The Hours, Penthesilea, Prima Facie, The Laws, Giovanni's Room and The Wall. With Bianca van der Schoot she created Time for Joy. In recent years, several of her productions for other companies have also been added to the ITA repertoire: The Years (Het Nationale Theater) and The End of Eddy (Toneelschuur Producties).
In the 2026/27 season she directs The Copenhagen Trilogy (Tove Ditlevsen), and her productions of The Hours (Michael Cunningham) and Prima Facie (Suzie Miller) are revived.
This season at ITA
CV
Arbo was born in Norway. After taking Theatre Studies at the University of Oslo, she moved to Amsterdam, where she graduated from the directing programme of the Theaterschool Amsterdam in 2016. She made her debut at Toneelschuur Producties with Goethe's classic Het lijden van de jonge Werther, which won her the BNG Bank Theaterprijs 2018 and the Toneelkijkersprijs 2018 in The Hague. She went on to direct the much-discussed De Revolutionairen, about the ideas of Albert Camus. In 2020 she directed The End of Eddy, based on the bestselling novel by Édouard Louis, which won her the Regieprijs 2020. The production was widely hailed as the best of the 2019/20 season and also earned her the Toneelkijkersprijs 2020 in The Hague; its four actors were jointly nominated for the Louis d'Or. Her final production at Toneelschuur Producties was Anton Chekhov's Drie Zusters. She has also directed several productions at Noord Nederlands Toneel, including Roland Schimmelpfennig's successful Zwart Water, which toured the Netherlands in 2019.
Alongside her work in the Netherlands, Arbo has directed a number of productions in Norway, including Henrik Ibsen's Hærmennene på Helgeland, which premiered at Nationaltheatret in Oslo during the 2018 Ibsen Festival and was subsequently invited to the Schauspielhaus Frankfurt.
In 2019 she directed a main-stage production of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, acclaimed by press and audiences alike. She followed it with Schiller's Maria Stuart, which opened in January 2021, and in 2022 with Jane Eyre, based on Charlotte Brontë's classic novel.
In January 2021 Arbo received the prestigious Mary Dresselhuys Prijs for her work over the preceding years.
In the Netherlands, her recent productions include Michael Cunningham's The Hours (2021) at ITA, Annie Ernaux's The Years (2022; Ernaux won the Nobel Prize that year) at Het Nationale Theater, and Heinrich von Kleist's Penthesilea (2023) and Suzie Miller's Prima Facie (2023) at ITA.
In 2024, Timerne, her Danish version of The Hours, premiered at Det Kongelige Teater in Copenhagen; her adaptation of Connie Palmen's debut novel The Laws opened at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam; her English version of The Years premiered at the Almeida Theatre in London; and Haugtussa, which she created with Nationaltheatret in Oslo, premiered at the Ruhrtriennale.
In spring 2025 her productions of James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room and Marlen Haushofer's The Wall premiered at ITA. Her Almeida production of The Years transferred to the West End in January 2025 and later that year won her the Olivier Award for Best Director.
