Manfred Rainer designs stage sets, video projections, films and plays, mostly in collaboration with Hannah Rosa Oellinger. He studied stage and film design as well as painting and animated film in Vienna and Dublin. Many of his stage designs are characterised by a desire for unusual solutions and the expansion of the stage space through video projections. For example, a stage set is sunk into the orchestra pit so that it is only visible to the audience via video surveillance (Proserpina at the Neue Oper Wien, 2021), hand-drawn single-frame animations interact with the protagonists of The Magic Flute (Opera national de Lorraine, 2021), and a decommissioned nuclear power plant becomes the setting for a documentary theatre play (Gemeinschaftskernkraftwerk 2022). The 2022/23 season recently took him to the opera houses of Nancy, Montpellier, Dortmund and Magdeburg.