Carola Volles studied costume design at the Berlin University of the Arts and graduated with a diploma. At the same time, she gained experience as an assistant and artistic collaborator on numerous theatre and opera productions, working very closely with Jorge Jara, Christof Loy and Herbert Murauer, amongst others, at opera houses both in Germany and abroad, including in Hamburg, Bremen, Hanover, Vienna, Graz, Brussels, Oslo, Riga, Monte Carlo, Barcelona, Toronto and London. Since 2010, Carola Volles has been working as a freelance set and costume designer for theatre, opera, dance and film. She works for, amongst others, the Landestheater in Coburg and Tübingen, the theatres in Hof, Münster, Regensburg, Erfurt and Magdeburg, the Residenztheater in Munich, the Staatstheater in Mainz, Darmstadt, Meiningen, Cottbus, Nuremberg, Saarbrücken and Karlsruhe, the Mainfrankentheater in Würzburg, the Musiktheater im Revier in Gelsenkirchen and the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf. Abroad, she has created costumes for the Landestheater Linz, the Theater Basel, the Opéra de Monte-Carlo, the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa, the Tel Aviv Opera, the Royal Opera House Muscat and the San Francisco Opera. She has created costumes for Dietrich W. Hilsdorf (Titus), Clemens Bechtel, Judith Kuhnert, Luzius Heydrich and Matthew Ferraro.
She has maintained a long-standing and close working relationship with the directors Matthias Straub, Jean-Louis Grinda, Tomo Sugao (Götterdämmerung, Il Trovatore, The Love for the Three Oranges), Ilaria Lanzino (Nabucco, La Traviata), the director and choreographer Demis Volpi, and the set designer and director Julius Theodor Semmelmann. Working in collaboration with Manuel Schmitt, she has so far created Otello, Salomé, Aida and Die griechische Passion. In 2018, Carola Volles won the Austrian STELLA* Performing Arts Award in the category of Outstanding Set Design.