Olga Shaishmelashvili was born in Leningrad. In 1996, she graduated from the Saint Petersburg Ioganson State Academic Art School under the All-Russian Academy of Arts and in 2002 – from the Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, Faculty of Monumental and Decorative Art.
Since 2011, she has worked as a set and costume designer.
Olga Shaishmelashvili worked with the Ruhrfestspiele (Germany) in 2011 and 2012, designing the sets for Demetrius after the drama of the same name by Friedrich Schiller (Director: A.Mindlin) and the sets and costumes for Areja (Stage Director: D.Zakharov).
In the 2018/19 season she was awarded the Golden Sofit, Saint Petersburg’s most prestigious theatre prize, Expert Council’s Special Prize for the non-standard decisions of space in Russian Matrix staged by Andrei Prikotenko.
As a set and costume designer Olga Shaishmelashvili has worked on dramatic productions with the Mikhail Chekhov Riga Russian Theatre (Latvia), the Moscow Academic Theatre of Satire, and the Vasily Kachalov Kazan Russian Drama Theatre.
Olga Shaishmelashvili created costumes for the ballets choreographed by Boris Eifman: Rodin (2011), Requiem (2014), Up & Down (2015), Tchaikovsky. Pro et Contra (2016), for Requiem, she created costumes at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, and for Rodin – at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires (2014). In 2015-2020 she created costumes for opera productions staged by Vasily Barkhatov such as Khovanshchina, The Gambler, Die Soldaten by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Eugene Onegin, L’Invisible by Aribert Reimann, Madama Butterfly, Faust – at the Theater Basel (Switzerland), Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden, Theater Saarbrücken, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm, and Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre.
As a set and costume designer Olga Shaishmelashvili has worked with the Saint Petersburg State Academic Yacobson Ballet Theatre on productions of such ballets as Stony Bank, Chopiniana, Grand pas from the Paquita ballet, and The Sleeping Beauty.
