He attended Melbourne Grammar School where he performed in Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in 1981, Shakespeare's Othello in 1982, and later directed his first play.
[1] In 1988, he directed there at the Union Theatre Mozart's Don Giovanni and Frank Wedekind's The Lulu Plays, Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box.
He directes Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann, Shakespeare's Macbeth in an all-female version,[e][8] and Boulevard Delirium with Paul Capsis which toured around the world for several seasons, including Australia where it won a 2006 Helpmann Award.
His 2003 staging of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo at the Innsbrucker Festwochen für Alte Musik conducted by René Jacobs was shown at the Berlin State Opera in 2007 and broadcast by arte.
[10] In the same year, Kosky directed in Germany Der fliegende Holländer at the Aalto-Musiktheater and Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream at the Theater Bremen.
[11] In that year, he also directed Britten's Peter Grimes for the Staatsoper Hannover, and Wagner's Tristan und Isolde for the Aalto-Musiktheater which received a nomination for the Faust Award.
In September 2008 Kosky directed Euripides' The Women of Troy with Melita Jurisic and Robyn Nevin in an adaptation by himself and Tom Wright at the Sydney Theatre Company.
[g] In October 2008, Kosky presented his stage adaption of the Edgar Allan Poe short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" at the Melbourne International Arts Festival.
Following several productions in the past at the Komische Oper Berlin, including Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (2003), Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro (2005), Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride, Porter's Kiss Me, Kate (2007) (broadcast on German TV 3sat in 2008), Verdi's Rigoletto (2009), Dvořák Rusalka (2011) and collaborating with 1927's Die Zauberflöte (2012),[12] Kosky became intendant and chief director for the company with the 2012/13 season.
He has since presented some rarely staged operettas there, like Abraham's Ball im Savoy and Oscar Straus' Die Perlen der Cleopatra [de].
[18][19] Commenting on the leading positions held by Jews in the Berlin cultural institutions, Kosky, who depicts himself as a "gay Jewish kangaroo", said:
[20]In January 2019, the Komische Oper Berlin announced that Kosky is to stand down as intendant at the close of the 2021/22 season, and subsequently to continue his affiliation with the company as in-house director.