Theatre director, set designer, painter, artistic director of several theatres.
Born on 29 June 1939 in Łódź. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, Painting Faculty, and from the State Theatre Academy in Warsaw, Direction Faculty. He cooperated with theatres in Łódź, Olsztyn, Poznań, Kraków, Warsaw and Wrocław, also working as a theatre director abroad - in the Hague, Utrecht, Leiden, Saint-Etienne. In 1991, especially for Wiener Festwochen, he prepared the premiere of Pułapka (The Trap) by Różewicz. Commissioned by the Théâtre National de Chaillot, he wrote the script of Miasto liczy psie nosy (City's Counting Dog Noses), staged in the Studio Theatre in 1991.

In 1978-1982 Grzegorzewski was the artistic director of the Polski Theatre in Wrocław. In 1982 he became the artistic director of the Studio Theatre Arts Centre in Warsaw, being recommended for the position by his predecessor, the renowned artist Józef Szajna. It was during his term of office that Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz became the patron of the Centre. Grzegorzewski was regarded as an eccentric whose style of work might have been better suited for a small experimental group, but nevertheless he continued a challenging cooperation with large repertoire theatres.
In 1997 he was appointed artistic director of the National Theatre in Warsaw - the first one after its reconstruction that had lasted many years. For the inauguration on 19 November 1997 he staged Noc listopadowa (The November Night) by Stanisław Wyspiański, one of the most prominent authors of the Polish modernism. Grzegorzewski formed a concept of the National Theatre as the Home of Wyspiański, planning successive productions of plays by this author every season. With Grzegorzewski in charge, the National Theatre recovered the reputation as one of the most important stages in Poland. He stepped down from the position in 2003, remaining employed as a stage director.

Grzegorzewski prepared Polish premieres of plays by John Webster (The White Devil, 1967), Jean Genet (The Balcony, 1972; The Screens, 1982). He was known for staging scripts based on novels, including Bloomusalem based on Joyce's Ulysses (1974, 1999), Powolne ciemnienie malowideł (Slow Darkening of Paintings) based on Lowry's Under the Volcano (1985), adaptations of Kafka's America (1973, 1982, 1989), Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1991), along with epic poems: Śmierć w starych dekoracjach (Death in Old Decorations, 1978), Złowiony (The Catch, 1994) and Duszyczka (The Little Soul, 2004) based on Różewicz's works, as well as Auden's The Sea and the Mirror (2002). Grzegorzewski directed plays by Witkiewicz (Szewcy - The Shoemakers, 1973; Oni - Them, 1988; Tak zwana ludzkość w obłędzie - So-Called Humanity Gone Mad, 1987 and 1992), Gombrowicz (Ślub - The Wedding, 1976 and 1998; Operetka - Operetta, 2000), Różewicz (The Trap, 1984), Mickiewicz (Dziady - dwanaście improwizacji - Forefather's Eve - Twelve Improvisations, 1995), Krasiński (Nie-Boska komedia - The Un-Divine Comedy, 1979 and 2002), Wyspiański (Wesele - The Wedding, 1969, 1977 and 2000; Sędziowie - The Judges, 1999).
He collected his favourite texts, and often returned to them - „Grzegorzewski's library" featured works by Shakespeare, Mann, Czekhov, Dostoevski, Strindberg, Joyce, Kafka, Lowry, Ionesco, Genet, Mickiewicz, Krasiński, Wyspiański, Witkiewicz, Gombrowicz, Różewicz.

Grzegorzewski was one of the first Polish directors to bravely deconstruct play texts, rewriting them, editing and placing in surprising contexts. This confused the audience and annoyed critics, who frequently reproached him for it. He developed his own scripts based on a number of existing works, constantly returning to the same themes, motifs and works, though each time with a new approach. Similarly, „the found objects" kept travelling through his stagings having different functions assigned in each of them. Those returns became the trademark of his theatre.
He was a master of lighting techniques - the stage was shrouded in twilight, the light pulsating to a mellow rhythm, with the amplitude of shadows and highlights precisely defined.
As Grzegorzewski admitted himself, the leading themes of his theatre works were: „a disaster of a certain world, Dantean journey through hell, death, and «bad love»". Critics also noted such recurring motifs as cultural crisis, catastrophism, melancholy, artist's fate. Grzegorzewski's theatre was a theatre deconstructing great cultural myths, including Polish myths of the Romantic period; it was deeply immersed in theatrical tradition, with which it was engaged in a constant dialogue. The director referred to various sources, treating them on a par, reaching beyond the limits of poetics, styles, manifestos, relating to the achievements of dadaism and unism, as well as contemporary cinema and Young Poland (Mloda Polska). He freely drew on the resources of both avant-garde and „classical theatre". He adored operettas.

Grzegorzewski's stagings were considered to be open form - the whole structure was segmented, dispersed, asymmetrical, with multiplicity of motifs, plurality of action, space and time, which were combined on the basis of associations. There was no linear plot development. It has been noted that the foundation of Grzegorzewski's theatre was a scenic transformation of a stream of consciousness - the visualisation of protagonist's sensitivity. The director attempted to express the directness of perception, experiences and emotions on the stage. Stage tensions that exerted such a strong influence were created through disruption of simple psychological or emotional messages, employing a detached literary quotation, a fraction of a situation, a maimed object (very often a musical instrument - cello or grand piano). In some performances the artist brought this approach to unusual extremes, building it almost exclusively upon quasi-musical tensions.
Releasing his own work from the automatism of existing senses, emotional clichés, schematic plot patterns, while at the same time intensifying musical tensions to supersede psychological tensions, Grzegorzewski was breaking through to undiscovered and irrational dimensions. The form was becoming a faithful record of an inexpressible experience or state. These spectacles were guided by discipline, structure, harmony, even if it was not obvious what order they referred to.

Owing to a unique type of acting, his shows engendered both spectator's affection and critical intellectual distance. In Grzegorzewski's theatre actors did not uncover their privacy, but forced the audience to notice in theatrical character at the same time an actor as a co-author of the work, a protagonist of a specific story, an abstract part of the stage set, and finally a „second self" upon which one's feelings can be projected. Distance did not signify indifference in Grzegorzewski's works. Quite the contrary - it involved a dramatic trait of a split human-artist, the main character of this theatre.
A „smouldering fuse" - this is how Grzegorzewski referred to spectacles that could have elicited public response, but usually „slipped sideways". The 1977 premiere of Wyspiański's Wedding in the Stary Theatre was an important event that later became a portrait of the Polish society in the crisis era, just before John Paul II was elected Pope and before „Solidarity" movement was born. Other significant shows include Genet's Screens staged during martial law, and City's Counting Dog Noses, which was a personal reminiscence of the martial law period from a ten years' perspective.
The director summarised his achievements making a joke in one of interviews: „Significance of my work for the theatre, considering it in the historical aspect, is that I introduced a pantograph to it..."

For a number of years Grzegorzewski cooperated on a regular basis with Stanisław Radwan, the composer, and Barbara Hanicka, the stage designer. He was a laureate of numerous awards, including an honorary doctorate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź (2001) and the Commander's Cross of Polonia Restituta Order (2002).
Jerzy Grzegorzewski died on 9 April 2005 in Warsaw. Both the Wierzbowa Street Hall of the National Theatre (Teatr Narodowy) in Warsaw, and the main stage of the Polski Theatre in Wrocław are named after him.