NITE/ HALIE
Floor Houwink ten Cate (1987) is a transdisciplinary theatre maker, director, and writer. Her work moves fluidly between performance, music theatre, and cinema. With a background in film, she creates physical portraits that expose intimate, often unspoken aspects of life, such as domestic violence (Sea of Silence) and the fear of dying from illness or in a war zone (Panic Room). Her work is politically engaged, emotionally layered, and merges fiction with documentary. Through this hybrid form, she creates unsettling confrontations that carve out space for reflection and dialogue.
After graduating from the Netherlands Film Academy and Utrecht University, she was co-artistic director of the music theatre collective Nineties Productions from 2015 to 2020. With this collective, she won the BNG Bank Theatre Prize in 2017 for emerging and innovative young makers. The successful electro-opera Merkel (2019) marked her directorial debut. At the international production house Frascati (NL), she created the acclaimed performances One Man Show (2021), on toxic masculinity, and Sea of Silence (2022). In collaboration with Katie Mitchell, Floor created the ecofeminist mini-opera A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction (2022) for the Holland Festival. In 2023, she was selected for the Women Opera Makers Workshop of the prestigious Académie of the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence.
Since 2023, Floor has been part of the artistic team of Theater Utrecht – Centre for Performing Arts. There, she directed the main stage productions Atropa (2023) and Panic Room (2024). Her latest main stage work, Battlefield of Dreams—a physical performance, intimate documentary, mini-opera and talk show in one, exploring the most political organ of all: the uterus—premiered in April 2025 to critical and public acclaim. In 2025–2026, Floor is the recipient of the Fast Forward grant from the Fonds Podiumkunsten, allowing her to further develop her artistic signature in collaboration with international partners.
