Floor Houwink ten Cate (1987) is a transdisciplinary theater maker, director and writer. Her work is a mix between performance, music theater and cinema. With a background in film, she creates portraits that expose intimate, unspoken aspects of life, such as domestic violence and the fear of dying in a war zone.

Her work is politically engaged, emotionally layered, and a fusion of fiction and documentary. She creates disruptive confrontations that demand space for reflection and dialogue. After graduating from the Netherlands Film Academy and Utrecht University, she was co-artistic director of the music theatre collective Nineties Productions. With this collective, she won the BNG Bank Theatre Prize for innovative young makers in 2017. The electro-opera Merkel (2019) was her directorial debut. At Frascati (NL), she subsequently created the highly acclaimed productions One Man Show (2021) about toxic masculinity and Sea of Silence (2022) about domestic violence. In collaboration with Katie Mitchell, Floor created the mini-opera A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction (2022) for the Holland Festival.

In 2023, she was selected for the Women Opera Makers Workshop of the prestigious Académie of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. Since then Floor has been part of the artistic team of Theater Utrecht – Centre for Performing Arts. There, she created the large-scale productions Atropa (2023) and Panic Room (2024). Her latest large-scale production Battlefield of Dreams—a physical performance, intimate documentary, mini-opera and talk show all in one, about the womb—was released in April 2025 and received with acclaim by the press and the public. In 2025-2026, Floor will receive the Fast Forward grant from the Performing Arts Fund to further develop her artistic signature with international partners.

Floor recently directed the show Brabo Leone (Sarah Janneh), the performance The Actor (Florian Meijer) and the band ‘De Staat Becomes The Staat’.