works as a freelance director, dramaturge and curator for music and media art. As a dramaturge, he has worked at the Münchner Kammerspiele, for the Ruhrtriennale and the Schauspielhaus Bochum, among others. Tobias Staab also curated large parts of the installation and music program of the Ruhrtriennale between 2015 and 2017. Together with the US choreographer Richard Siegal, he founded the dance company Ballet of Difference in 2016, which has established itself as a permanent company of the city of Cologne.
As a freelance curator, he also launched various programs and festivals in the fields of music as well as performative and installative 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 the following years. The festival Noise Signal Silence, founded and curated by Tobias Staab, is located at the interface 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 Bauhaus 100 Festival at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, he curated 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 co-founded the DIVE Festival for Immersive Arts in Bochum. Since 2018 he has curated and directed the new media art center Oval Office in Bochum, where he exhibits internationally renowned artists such as Matthew Barney, Julian Rosefeldt, Jon Rafman, Tianzhuo Chen, Kurt Hentschläger, Michael Saup, Ulf Langheinrich, Ivana Franke and Terry Riley. In 2022 together with choreographer Guy Weizman he will be curating the program Dance and Digital Space for the Tanzkongress Festival in Mainz.
In 2018 Tobias Staab wrote and directed the music theater project O Augenblick as a tribute to theater. In 2020, he developed and staged the evening After Work - A Requiem for the Working Man, which explores the relationship between work and identity at the intersection of dance, drama 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, which published a work based on texts by Donna Haraway and Ursula K. Le Guin at Schauspiel Leipzig in June 2021 under the title The Shape of Trouble to Come. Since 2020, Tobias Staab has been increasingly involved with film and video. Building on the electronic music of Modeselektor, and together with with dancer Corey Scott-Gilbert and video artist Krsn Brasko he conceived and co-directed the performance film Work, which was released on ARTE concerts in April 2021. In Cologne, he also worked as co-director and dramaturg with Richard Siegal on the interdisciplinary streaming performance All for One and One for the Money, which premiered online in November 2020. His most recent video work Trans Corporal Formations premiered as a 5-channel video installation at Jena's Theater in Bewegung Festival in November 2021. Together with dancers from Ballet of Difference he explores the transformative potential of the human body between the analog and the digital.