[citation needed] Warlikowski directed his first plays at Stary Teatr in Kraków, where he staged Heinrich von Kleist's The Marquis of O. in 1993.

[3] In 2021 he received the Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award at the Teatro Biennale in Venice for being "the advocate for a profound renewal of the European language of theatre", "relying on references from cinema and an original use of video, inventing new forms of theatre that aim to re-establish the bond between the play and the audience" encouraging the latter to "rip away the paper backdrop of their lives and to discover what is really hidden underneath".

[4] Warlikowski is gay[5] and was in a long relationship with actor Jacek Poniedziałek[6] but he is currently married to Polish set designer Małgorzata Szczęśniak who is his life partner.

They thus affirm an identity not thanks to a preconstituted formal universe or to a way of working, but to a subjective experience whose scope is shown by their productions.

Already known in Germany, discovered in Avignon thanks to an innovative Hamlet and above all to Sarah Kane’s Cleansed, a masterpiece of staging, followed by a harrowing Dibbouk and Hanok Levin’s Kroum, he relentlessly follows his investigation into the lacerated condition of modern man.

In recent years his theatre work has been joined by opera productions, where, without denying its needs, Warlikowski injects a dose of the contemporary tragedy with which his art and his being continue to be imbued.