Alexandra Balona
Alexandra Balona is a researcher, writer and independent curator in the field of performing arts, visual arts and architecture, based in Porto. Invited lecturer in the Post-graduation in Contemporary Dance, ESMAE-RIVOLI-ESE (Porto, 2016), she is a doctoral student (ABD) at the European Graduate School & Lisbon Consortium, under the supervision of Samuel Weber and Isabel Gil, with a grant awarded by FCT (Portugal). She curated “Migratory Images – Thinking Lab in Performing Arts”, Rivoli city theatre (Porto, 2015). She participated in Mais Critica (More Critic) – Seminar for Performing Arts’ critics, and was critic in residence in the performance art cycle “Vital Matters” at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (Porto, 2012-2013). She attended the Paris Program in Critical Theory and was visiting student at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris, 2010-2011). She is graduated in Architecture (FAUP, 2001), post-graduated in Contemporary Art (UCP-Porto, 2008), and between 2002 and 2008 she worked in several architecture offices in Porto and Switzerland. She has published articles on architecture, visual and performing arts.
Nassia Fourtouni
Nassia Fourtouni is a writer, dramaturge and performer based in Brussels. She holds a BA in English Literature and Linguistics from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, a dance teaching diploma from Despoina Grigoriadou Professional Dance School in Athens, an MA in Theatre and Dance Studies from Utrecht University and an MA in Cultural Studies from the Catholic University of Leuven. She has collaborated as a dramaturg with the choreographer Andonis Foniadakis, the visual artist Antigone Michalakopoulou, the theatre director Effie Theodorou, and as a writer with Athens Festival and Workspace Brussels. She is interested in performance making and research, choreography as an expanded notion, writing methodologies, observing habits, the writing of history, silent subjects, archiving, maps, jokes, walking and philosophy of science, among other things. She received the Impulstanz Danceweb scholarship for 2016.
Aleksandar Georgiev
Aleksandar (MK/BG/SWE) are a choreographer/performer/teacher/curator based in SSS (Stockholm/Skopje/Sofia) but operates nomadically around Europe, for now. They have couple of formal and non-formal educational programs where they took part at, like NOMAD, SPAZIO, DanceWeb, 50 Days Fly Low and Passing Through. Now they got the scholarship for Critical Practice program, and recently they graduated their MA program in Choreography at DOCH. In terms of work they create since 2008, which have been performed internationally on festivals, connected to the networks they are part of. Recently they explore the collective authorship formats of creation. They are busy around the celebration of the body with the project called “Celebrate it!” (in co-authorship with Zhana Pencheva(BG) and Nefeli Oikonomou(GR)) and the family collaborations with the project umbrella MRF- Madness runs in the Family (in collaboration with Dragana Zarevska (MK)). They are going to premiere two new works in the spring, follow up… This and the following year they are still active in performing for other artists like Doris Ulrich, Michael Turinsky, Nefeli Oikonomou and some other. As bureaucratically representative structures, they are active member of Nomad Dance Academy-Macedonia, Nomad Dance Academy-Bulgaria, Garage Collective (Bulgaria) and Interimkultur (Sweden). They are co-dreamers in co-structures embracing co-practices with their co-poetics, within their cultural/curatorial work around the program of “CO-existing”. The program contain international residency and festival based in Skopje, and it’s done in collaboration with Elena Risteska and Viktorija Ilioska. When it comes to education structures they are busy with morning trainings and practice based workshops, they have intention of spreading co-poetics within co-functional structures where its stimulated co-dreaming as a co-practice.
Shortly ….ace
Nina Gojić
Nina Gojić is a dramaturge and cultural worker based in Zagreb, Croatia. She holds an MA in International Performance Research from the University of Amsterdam and University of Warwick, and an MA in Performance Dramaturgy from the Academy of Dramatic Arts, University of Zagreb. She is mostly active in the Croatian independent scene where she regularly works as a dramaturge and researcher in devised theatre and contemporary dance projects with directors, choreographers and new media artists such as Vedran Hleb, Morana Novosel, Oliver Frljić, Bojan Mucko, Saša Božić, Martina Nevistić. Her research interests include the cultural history of socialist Yugoslavia, collectivity in art practices, reconstructions in contemporary dance and performance, the issue of animal on stage etc. She used to be a member of the editorial board of Frakcija, a performing arts journal, and now regularly writes and publishes essays in the field of performance theory, as well as screenplays and performance texts. She is a member of the Croatian Centre for Drama Arts, SPID – Croatian Screenwriters and Playwrights Guild and the Croatian Freelance Artists Association.
Ana Letunić
Ana Letunić is a performing arts producer, curator and cultural policy researcher based in Zagreb, Croatia. She graduated with honors from Master in International Performance Research at University of Warwick, UK and University of Arts, Belgrade after obtaining BA degrees in Psychology and in Theatre and Film Production at the University of Zagreb. She worked as a producer and a programmer within projects such as Ganz New Festival (Zagreb), European Capital of Culture (Dubrovnik), World Theatre Festival (Zagreb), BITEF (Belgrade), International Choreographic Centre (Amsterdam), Warwick Arts Center (Birmingham) and artists such as Ivana Muller, Sonja Pregrad and Nina Gojić. She is one of the authors and curators of Unlisted, a series of site-specific performances that was realised in Belgrade (Serbia) in 2012 and in Pittsburgh and New York (USA) in coproduction with Yinzerspielen (2013). She has been publishing essays on performing arts curating and cultural politics locally and internationally, as one of her main research interests is the impact of cultural policies on programming strategies in contemporary performing arts. Currently she is a PhD candidate at the University of Arts in Belgrade, works as a director of an artistic organization “Mašina”, an editor for “Cultural Policy and Management Platform”and as a teaching assistant at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb.
Ellen Söderhult
Ellen Söderhult is based in Stockholm and works within the field of dance and choreography. She holds a BA in circus since 2010 and completed a second BA, this time in contemporary dance performance, at DOCH in 2016. After graduating Ellen initiated the project Nobody’s Business together with Eleanor Bauer and Alice Chauchat. Inspired by open source, the ambition is to facilitate collective production- and distribution of knowledge within the performing arts through shared practice and its documentation. In collaboration with 20 other dancers she has performed several versions of the piece RUDY, a piece for which no dances are innovated. Through transformative recycling RUDY attempts to propose a calm moment in which empathy, care, togethering, following, supporting and bastardizing imitation are considered vital aspects of art. She collaborated with Mandi Tiukkanen on the balletic duet THIS IS GRAND. During the fall of 2015 Ellen performed Huddle and Slantboard by Simon Forti at Index, the Swedish contemporary art foundation. Ellen has a strong interest in structures for delegation as a method for collective authorship as well as dance as a collective and a-personal art form. She is a member of the employment cooperative Interim Kultur and has written for Koreografisk Journal, contemporarycruising.com and Danstidningen.
Aniko Szucs
Aniko Szucs teaches at the Departments of Drama and Media, Culture and Communication at New York University and at the Department of Communication and Theatre Arts at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She defended her dissertation “Entrapped in the Archive: State Security Documents Recontextualized in the Hungarian Art World” under the direction of Diana Taylor at the Performance Studies Department of New York University in 2015. Before her academic career, Aniko was the resident dramaturg of the Vígszínház (Comedy Theatre) in Budapest between 2000 and 2005. As a dramaturg and translator, she also worked with director Andrei Șerban at the National Theatre of Budapest, with director Róbert Alföldi at Portland Center Stage, OR, and the Dicapo Opera, NY, with director Elyse Singer at the Hourglass Group, as well as with director Enikő Eszenyi at the Arena Stage in Washington, DC. Between 2007 and 2008, she was the Assistant Editor of TDR: The Drama Review, and in 2009 she co-curated the exhibition “Revolutionary Voices: Performing Arts in Central & Eastern Europe in the 1980s” at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center. She has published articles in numerous anthologies and journals in both English and Hungarian.
Mateusz Szymanówka
Mateusz Szymanówka is a dramaturge and curator in the field of contemporary performance and choreography. He studied cultural, theatre and dance studies in Warsaw and Berlin. He currently lives and works between the two cities. As dramaturge he was involved in projects of Agata Siniarska, Korina Kordova, Ania Nowak, Marta Ziółek and Przemek Kamiński. His recent curatorial projects include: Like a Thing – the summer edition of the contemporary dance program in Teatr Studio in Warsaw (2016), Back to the Future in the City Art Gallery in Kalisz (2016) and the exhibition Frames of Reference. Choreography in the Museum in the Museum of Art in Łódź (2016, co-curated with Katarzyna Słoboda). In 2016 he received the Grażyna Kulczyk Research Scholarship in Contemporary Choreography for the project Think Tank Choreograficzny – a platform dedicated to a collective research on choreographic practices developed in the space between Polish and international dance contexts and their economies. His articles appear in the theatre journal Didaskalia, on the online magazine dwutygodnik.com and on the web-portal taniecPOLSKApl.
