She was born in Wiesbaden in 1964. After studying musicology and German philology in Kiel, Strasbourg and Berlin, she worked for the Kreuzberger Klangwerkstatt, a festival for New Music in Berlin. From 1993 to 1999, she was director and dramaturg of the Neuköllner Oper Berlin; from 1999 to 2006, she worked at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin as a dramaturg. Since 2006, she has worked as freelance dramaturg and/or artistic production manager for Berliner Staatsoper, Gärtnerplatz-Theater in Munich, Theater St. Gallen, Oper Bonn, Staatstheater Braunschweig, Radialsystem V, Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, Vocalconsort Berlin, Rundfunkchor Berlin, Mendelssohn Kammerorchester Leipzig, the international music festival Himmel auf Erden in Wittenberg and the Schleswig-Holstein Musikfestival among others.
Ilka Seifert has been working with Sasha Waltz in various capacities since 2007, on productions including Romeo et Juliette (Paris 2007) and the choreographic operas Passion (Paris 2010) and Matsukaze (Brussels/Warsaw/Luxembourg/Berlin 2011/2015), the dance project MusicTANZ – Carmen of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (2012) as well as the project human requiem featuring the Rundfunkchor Berlin (Berlin/Hamburg 2012, Rotterdam 2014, Berlin/Paris/Amsterdam 2015, Hongkong/New York 2016).
Recently, she has developed a range of installative concert formats together with Folkert Uhde, including sounds & clouds with the Holland Baroque Society and Jeremias Schwarzer for the Flanders Festival in Kortrijk/ION Nürnberg/Radialsystem V/Montfort Zwischentöne, Über Wunden with Concerto Köln at International Orgelwoche Nürnberg and for Niedersächsische Musiktage. For the Mendelssohn Kammerorchester Leipzig, she created two projects within the series Konzerte für Neugierige.
Projects currently in planning include alif::split in the wall with Chiharu Shiota, Jeremias Schwarzer and the Berlin Zafraan Ensemble, außen-innen with ensemble resonanz for Hamburger Kunsthalle and “acht Lieder with Deutscher Jugendkammerchor in the context of chor@berlin.