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Milo Rau was born in Bern, Switzerland, on January 25, 1977. He studied sociology, German and Romance studies in Paris, Zurich and Berlin; among his teachers were Tzvetan Todorov and Pierre Bourdieu. Since 2000, Rau has been working as a writer and director, primarily for the theater. He has written and directed numerous plays, but also writes books, organizes art events and directs feature films. In 2007 he founded the theater and film production company IIPM - International Institute of Political Murder for the production and distribution of his artistic works, which he has headed ever since.
As a director, Rau has worked at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin, the Théâtre des Amandiers in Paris, the Beursschouwburg Brussels and the Münchner Kammerspiele, among others. With his productions he participated at renowned international festivals, such as the Berlin Theatertreffen, the Festival d'Avignon, the Venice Biennale, the Wiener Festwochen and the Brussels Kunstenfestivaldesarts. Numerous of his plays toured the world. In addition to his own works, he has also staged plays by other authors, for example "Five Easy Pieces" at the Sophiensälen in Berlin in 2016 and "The 120 Days of Sodom" at the Schauspielhaus Zurich in 2017.
Rau has received a number of awards for his artistic work, including the prestigious ITI World Theater Day Award in 2016 (as the youngest artist after Frank Castorf and Pina Bausch) and the 3sat Prize in 2017. Also in 2017, he was voted "Director of the Year" in a survey conducted by the theater trade paper Deutsche Bühne. In 2018, he received the European Theatre Award for Lifetime Achievement (!); in 2019, he was an "Associated Artist" of the European Association of Theatre and Performance (EASTAP). In the same year, he received an honorary doctorate from Lund University Malmö (Sweden). For his work as a writer, Rau has been awarded, among others, the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden (2014), the Peter Weiss Prize (2017), and the Gerty Spies Literature Prize (2020).
Rau's works are almost all characterized by a political stance: "Die letzten Tage der Ceausescus" (CH/DE 2010), a film version of his much-praised experimental stage production, was a reenactment of the conviction of the Ceausescu couple and their execution on Christmas Day 1989; in "Die Moskauer Prozesse" ("The Moscow Trials", 2014), Russian artists, curators, activists and musicians such as the members of the band Pussy Riot reenacted their own court trials, which were held against them because of their anti-authority stance. Also in a mixture of documentary film and documentary theater, "Das Kongo Tribunal" ("The Congo Tribunal", DE/CH 2017) dealt with the effects of the seemingly endless civil war in eastern Congo. This film was also based on a (30-hour) stage project, which the London Guardian called 'the most ambitious political theater project ever staged.' At the Zurich Film Awards, "Das Kongo Tribunal" won Best Documentary. It was also nominated for Best Documentary at the German Film Awards and the Swiss Film Awards.
In addition to his stage and film work, Rau has lectured on directing, cultural theory and social sculpture at various universities and art colleges. In 2017, he held the Saarbrücken Poetikdozentur for drama. Since the same year, he has been a member of the team of literature experts on the television program "Literaturclub" alongside Elke Heidenreich, Rüdiger Safranski and Martin Ebel.
For the 2018/19 season, Rau became artistic director of the Netherlands Theater Gent (NTGent), Belgium. His stated goal is to create a 'global people's theater' there that specializes in international touring. In 2020, Ghent University awarded him an honorary doctorate. In 2020, he received the prestigious Münster Poetikdozentur for his complete artistic works.
The film version of his play "Orestes in Mossul" opened the Dutch Theatre Festival in September 2020. At the same time, Rau's book "Why Theatre?" was published, for which he asked 100 leading intellectuals and artists from around the world to answer this question. At the end of 2020, Rau's film "Das neue Evangelium" ("The New Gospel") was released only as video-on-demand due to the Corona pandemic. In it he documents how he stages a passion play with refugees from Africa who are exploited as farm workers in southern Italy and explores the question of what Jesus would preach in the 21st century and how he would position himself politically and humanistically.