Vladimír Franz

Vladimír Franz (born 25 May 1959 in Prague, Czechoslovakia), is a Czech composer, painter, university scholar and occasional journalist, poet and playwright. Since the mid-1980s, he has composed stage music for more than 150 theatre performances—for many of which he was awarded national-level prizes. He has also composed a symphony, several operas, oratorios, a musical, a ballet, film music, and music for documentaries and radio plays. His second main area of activities in the field of arts is represented by painting. Since 1991 he has been a lecturer at the Prague’s Faculty of Theatre. In 2012 he was also a registered candidate in the 2013 Czech presidential election. The attention of local and global media has been focused on him due to his extraordinarily extensive tattoos. Biography Franz was born in Prague. He studied at a gymnasium and later at the Faculty of Law of Charles University (1978–1982). During his studies, he took private lectures in painting, composition, art history and music history. After his studies, he did not enter legal practice, but instead spent the 1980s in a variety of jobs, including as a high school teacher. In 1981, he co-founded the theatre Kytka, a