works as a freelance artist, dramaturge and curator. As a dramaturge, he has worked at the Münchner Kammerspiele, the Schauspielhaus Zürich, and Opera Vlaanderen, among others. Tobias Staab curated large parts of the installation and music program of the Ruhrtriennale between 2015 and 2017. Together with US choreographer Richard Siegal, he founded the dance company Ballet of Difference in 2016.
Tobias Staab's artistic works, which he often develops in a collaborative practice with other artists, present themselves as transdisciplinary performances between music, dance, film and installation. In 2018 Tobias Staab wrote and directed the music theater project "O, Augenblick" as a homage to theater. In 2020, he developed and staged the piece "After Work - A Requiem for the Working (Wo)Man", which explores the relationship between work and identity at the intersection of dance, theater and visual arts. Since July 2020 Tobias Staab has been part of the performance group FARN. collective together with Sandra Hüller, Tom Schneider, Michael Graessner, Moritz Bossmann and Sandro Tajouri. In June 2021, the collective developed the piece "The Shape of Trouble to Come" (based on texts by Donna Haraway and Ursula K. Le Guin), which toured through various cities in Germany.
Since 2020, Tobias Staab has been increasingly involved with film and video. Building on the electronic music of Modeselektor, he co-conceived and co-directed the performance film "Work" together with dancer Corey Scott-Gilbert and video artist Krsn Brasko, which was broadcast on ARTE in April 2021. In Cologne, he worked as co-director with Richard Siegal on the interdisciplinary streaming performance "All for One and One for the Money", which premiered online in November 2020 and was later also shown in the context of the DANCE Festival Munich. His video work "Trans Corporal Formations" premiered as a 5-channel video installation at the Jena Theater in Bewegung Festival in November 2021 and has since toured to Cologne, Berlin and Munich. Together with dancers from the Ballet of Difference, he explores the transformative potential of the human body between the analog and the digital. In August 2022, the video installation "Euphoria", for which Staab worked on the script together with artist Julian Rosefeldt, premiered at the Ruhrtriennale "Euphoria" has since been shown in New York (Park Avenue Armory), in Melbourne (Rising), and Amsterdam (Holland Festival).
In December 2022 Tobias Staab released his new dance performance Autonomous Avatar, which reflects on the potentials and dangers of artificial intelligences and took place at the Planetarium Bochum. As part of the work, dancers* control digital avatars on the dome of the Fulldome in real time with the help of motion-capture suits. In May 2023, Staab's film "BARDO" premiered at the Moovy Dance Film Festival in Cologne, where he collaborated with choreographer Gustavo Gomes. The work focuses on the relationship between dance and dying and was developed with dancers of different generations. Parallel to the film, the augmented reality installation "BARDO AR" was created, which also premiered in Cologne. These works are part of an artistic exploration over several years, which deals with death in different cultures and from different aesthetic perspectives. In this context, Tobias Staab traveled to Tokyo in September 2022 with the support of the Goethe-Institut to intensively explore the relationship to the dying body in Japanese Butoh. In the spring of 2023, he received a grant to research this project (Recherche-Förderung / Fonds Darstellende Künste).
As a freelance curator, Tobias Staab has also created various programs and festivals in the field of music as well as performative and installation arts: With Ritournelle, he established a festival for advanced electronic music at the Münchner Kammerspiele in 2012, which also took place at the Schauspielhaus Bochum and as part of the Ruhrtriennale in subsequent years. The festival Noise Signal Silence, created as part of the extended universe of Ballet of Difference and curated by Tobias Staab, is located at the intersection of experimental electronic music, media art and dance and took place in Munich and Cologne in 2017 and 2018. In 2019, as part of the Bauhaus100 Festival at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, he was invited by Bettina Wagner-Bergelt to curate an interdisciplinary program entitled Hyper.Culture, which formulated a concept for a future, queer and intercultural Bauhaus of the 21st century. In 2019, Tobias Staab became co-founder of the DIVE Festival of Immersive Arts in Bochum. Between 2018 and 2022, he curated and directed the media art center Oval Office in Bochum, where he invited a number of internationally renowned artists*, including Matthew Barney, Julian Rosefeldt, Jon Rafman, Tianzhuo Chen, Kurt Hentschläger, Michael Saup, Ulf Langheinrich, Ivana Franke, and Terry Riley.
Together with choreographer Guy Weizman, he curated the Dance and Digital Space program for the 2022 Dance Congress in Mainz. Staab has also served on numerous juries for arts awards, including the German Theater Prize FAUST and the European Center for Creative Economy (ECCE). From 2023 Tobias Staab will take over the artistic direction of the International DANCE Festival in Munich. His first festival edition will take place in May 2025.