Rachella Kingswijk

Rachella Kingswijk is a Paris (France) based actress from Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She was born in Moengo, Suriname (October 2nd, 1985) and moved to the Netherlands when she was two years old. Her acting career began at the age of eight, when she started her studies at the Amsterdam Youth Theatre School. She attended the school for seven years and performed in numerous stage plays. At the age of twelve, she hosted a children's TV show on AT5, Amsterdam's local television channel. Her first big acting role came at the age of fourteen, when she played Captain Hook in the stage play, Peter Pan. Not long thereafter, she began acting in short films. At seventeen, Kingswijk had a supporting role in the 2003 short film Vet! This film was the winner of the Silver Bear in Berlin and received nominations for both the Golden Calf and the Gold Hugo--all in the category of Best Short Film. From December 2010 until July 2011, Kingswijk traveled in West and East Africa. After she returned to Europe, she joined the cast of The Amsterdam Dungeon, an obscure and interactive theatrical experience, where she played several horror characters. She worked there until early 2013 and went on to play the character Kaya in the historical Daniel Bruce film Into Thin Air (Dutch title: In het niets)--a film about de Bijmerramp, the 1992 plane crash in Amsterdam. The film premiered at the Dutch Film Festival in September 2013. In September 2015, Kingswijk performed solo at the Amsterdam Fringe Festival with Zijn naam was Wolf ("His Name Was Wolf"), a play she wrote about human trafficking. The play was well-received, and she was invited to play several monologues for Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands during a CoMensha congress. CoMensha, also known as La Strada Netherlands, is the national center of expertise dedicated to victims of human trafficking. In the Fall of 2015, Kingswijk moved to Paris, where she studied Performance Art at the prestigious international theatre school, L'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq. After graduating, she was cast as a physical actress/mime for the opera Benvenuto Cellini by Berlioz, directed by Terry Gilliam and Leah Hausman. The opera was last performed in the spring of 2018 at L'Opera National de Paris, with an audience of 2,700 people every night. In 2021, she returned to the Paris opera, this time puppeteering the title role in the opera Aïda, working closely with Sondra Radvanovsky and Jonas Kaufman. She was directed by Lotte de Beer and Mervyn Millar. Rachella Kingwijk still lives in Paris, where she works as a stage- and film actress, puppeteer, and playwright.