Born in Frankfurt am Main, Andrea Schwalbach studied philosophy and theatre sciences at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. In 1990 she founded the Mutare Musiktheater Ensemble Frankfurt with the Dramaturg Dr.Regine Elzenheimer, the Composer Gerhard Müller-Hornbach and the Cultural Scientist Stephan Buchberger. Through the ensuing years, the Ensemble premiered numerous Operaprojects and engaged in the Research of new Forms of Musictheatre.

In addition to her Passion for new Music, she has directed more than 60 Productions from the Opera-Operetta- and Musicalrepertoire. Her Productions have opened in the  Staatsoper unter den Linden Berlin, the Staatsoper Stuttgart, the Staatstheater Kassel, the Oper Frankfurt, the Nationaltheater Mannheim, Flaamse Opera Antwerp/Gent, the Staatstheater Braunschweig, the Staatstheater Darmstadt, the Staatsoper Hannover, and repeatedly at the opera houses in Bonn, Hannover, Wuppertal, Saarbrücken, Linz, Osnabrück, Heidelberg and Oldenburg.

Under her direction many Worldpremieres and first Performances as well as rarely performed Operas have been created , such as Giorgio Battistelli’s Prova d’orchestra , the Stravinsky Project Tilimbom at the Frankfurt Opera, Der Golem von d’Albert at the Bonn Opera, Hamlet by Ambroise Thomas and The Rape of Lucretia by Britten at the Bielefeld Theatre or Satyagraha by Glass and the Idiot by Weinberg, as well as Boesman’s Yvonne Princesse de Bourgogne and Maria von Statkowski, Three Sisters of Eötvös, Mauricio Kagels From Germany each at the Staatstheater Oldenburg, Sciarrino’s Superflumina at the Nationaltheater Mannheim, the DE of Kaija Saariaho’s Adriana Mater, the world premiere of Schubert’s/ Jelinek’s Der Tausendjährige Posten or her adaptation of the project Summernightdreamers by Purcell/Britten/Casken at the Theater Heidelberg. 

Parallel to the development of the Plays, she stages key works of the Operrepertoire such as Die Meistersinger, La Bohéme, Tosca, Cosi fan tutte, Zauberflöte, Katja Kabanova, The Barber of Seville, Don Pasquale, Freischütz, L’Italiana in Algerie and many more. Another focus is on his own arrangements of Operettas such as Das weiße Rössl, Die lustige Witwe, Ball im Savoy, Die Blume von Hawaii, Herzogin von Chicago. A project-related teaching Activity took her to the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and the Salzburg Festival, where she was the director of the international directing workshop.