Master programme students, graduating 2025
Zsófi Rebeka Kozma
Zsófi Kozma is a performance maker and performer from Budapest. She is currently working on addressing labor injustices through data visceralization and visualization and the role of the embedded artist. She is concerned about social inequality, the immigrant experience, collective action and the disappearing welfare state.
She works with recontextualizing her body, documents, sounds, objects, non-verbal actions through performative scores and playfulness with the audience. She collaborates with people from diverse backgrounds and disciplines, such as grassroots movements, social scientists, dancers, filmmakers, musicians and other theatermakers.
Her work has been shown at festivals in Hungary, Romania and Serbia. She is co-founder of the National Performance Art Theater Collective, a Budapest-based collective focusing on issues in Hungary’s current political climate.
She holds a degree from CUNY Hunter College and a certificate from Freeszfe Society. Upon completing her MA in Malmö she plans to contribute her performance and organizing practice towards creating a more equal and inclusive society at home and abroad.
kozmazsofiarebeka [at] gmail [dot] com (Contact via e-mail)
Photo: Jenny Leyman
Filip Pawlak
Filip Pawlak is a around-30-year-old Polish, red-haired, crip artist with a shorter left hand.
His journey includes working as an expert for Europe Beyond Access, as head of production department in Nowy Teatr Warsaw or as advisor for Theatertreffen Berlin. But after a decade of work in culture and the arts under many hats—as a performer, producer or activist—he is now focusing on his own artistic projects.
In 2024 he receive “Young Poland” scholarships from the Polish Ministry of Culture and was an artist-in-residance at Hellerau Art Center, Komuna/Warszawa Theatre but also Skanes Dansteater. His key project, Freak Show, is a multidisciplinary piece that includes a documentary film he is directing, as well as a gallery performance featuring leading young crip and D/deaf artists in Poland. What draws him to crip art is its fluid definition and its paradoxical reminder of art’s impossibility—a fleeting promise of a world imagined but withheld, a space where judgment is suspended, even if only for the duration of a performance.
In the 2025/2026 season, he is preparing the premiere of the film and performance tour of Freak Show, a new show about disability as a tool for immortality at the Scena Robocza in Poznan, and the start of his doctorate at the Film School in Katowice.
More info > www.filippawlak.com
f [dot] d [dot] pawlak [at] gmail [dot] com (Contact via e-mail)
Photo: Renata Dąbrowska
Monirah Hashemi
Monirah Hashemi is an accomplished stage actor, director, and playwright. Her pivotal role in co-founding the Simorgh Film Association of Culture and Art in Herat, Afghanistan, in 2005, established an artistic platform for young individuals to employ film and theater as means to address pertinent social issues and facilitate constructive dialogues. With a distinct focus on women-led productions, Hashemi has orchestrated numerous plays exclusively led by women, garnering both national and international acclaim. Noteworthy among her theatrical creations are Letter of Suffering, Flute Sonance, Salsaal & Shahmaama, Alkhatoo, Masks under Burka, and Stones and Mirrors.
In March 2013, she played a key role in the establishment of the A Night With Buddha Festival in Afghanistan. The festival, dedicated to the memory of the Buddha Statues in Bamiyan Valley destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, stands as a poignant testament to her commitment to cultural preservation and historical remembrance.
Having transitioned to Sweden, Hashemi's creative endeavors continued to flourish. She penned Sitaraha-The Stars and Who Lights The Stars, both of which have enjoyed successful tours across Sweden and international venues. This trajectory underscores her enduring dedication to utilizing the arts for dialogue, empowerment, and cross-cultural exchange.
monirah [dot] hashemi [at] gmail [dot] com (Contact via e-mail)
Jurrien van Rheenen
Jurrien van Rheenen is a performer and documentary theatre maker based in the Netherlands. Together with her team, she sets up projects that explore social and political systems. With field study and journalistic approaches they delve into systems that are often kept out of sight. Her work explores new forms of socially engaged theatre, focusing on the lived experiences behind social and political structures and the role of the audience within the performance. By making the audience’s physical presence an essential part of the performance, the work guides them into perspectives and spaces that are often hidden from view. The work explores the gap between policies and the lived experience of those impacted, aiming to create a bridge between the two.
Her latest work is about homelessness policies in Sweden and is created in collaboration with actors from Malmö Stadsteater.
Jurrien van Rheenen is a member of the collective De Theaterstraat based in Amsterdam and will begin working as a creator and co-artistic leader at Theater de Generator in September 2025, both based in the Netherlands.
jurrienvanrheenen [at] gmail [dot] com (Contact via e-mail)
Sall Lam Toro
(1990) Body_hacker (aka Sall Lam Toro) was born in Portugal and is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, working with immersive multimedia performance art, orchestrating sensuous meetings, entanglements and rituals between the human and non-human.
They do so within the context of unnumbing and hacking bodies from everyday violent structures of modern capitalism and legacies of coloniality. This looks like involving the erotic, or, the sensuous (in an Audre Lorde type of way) as a way to confront alienation and illusions of separation in the modern living world between humans and non-humans. They also engage in community organizing around queer care work and autonomous living, and live and work collectively as part of queer housing and art collectives.
Photo: Arthur Aizikovich
Maryam Hashempour
Maryam Hashempour (1998) is an Iranian theater-maker and writer. In her works, she meets the poetics of cities and excavates personal histories. She creates interactive, interdisciplinary performances that integrate gamification and digital tools to shape immersive experiences. Her interests lie in performances without performers, bodiless performers, and contagious performances that bypass immobility in migratory context. Maryam holds a degree in Dramatic Literature from Tehran University, where she developed a practice deeply rooted in Iran’s experimental and informal theater scene, exploring writing methods for contemporary performance and approaches to collaborative text creation. She currently resides in Sweden, where she is pursuing a master’s degree in Performing Arts as Critical Practice at Malmo Theatre Academy, Lund University.
Maryam Hashempour | Theatermaker
maryamhashempour.com
maryam [dot] hashempour97 [at] gmail [dot] com (Contact via e-mail)
Photo: Amirhossein Zarifian
Dina Gordon
Dina Gordon is a theatre maker and performer from Sweden, whose work searches for the blurred space between the so-called fictive and the so-called real. Always on the lookout for characters on the streets of nondescript cities, whose inner lives have gone unnoticed to most. She wants to place these peripheral lives on a stage. Making it the centre of a universe that is unsettling, comic and always in between.
Dina has a background in Classical Ballet from The Royal Swedish Ballet School and Acting from East 15 Acting School in London, where she worked for almost a decade before moving back to Sweden. She's made work performed at The Yard Theatre, VAULT Festival, Bloomsbury, RADA, Prague and Norway Fringe Festival. Her current work is the culmination of two years of deepening, expanding and transforming her practice. Her exam piece 'Lose again. Lose better.' is personal, dark and comic. And delves into the archetype of the grifter, the snake oil salesman and charlatan. But whose character very unexpectedly, (and perhaps dangerously), inspires the will to not give up on oneself. And go out into the world bravely and prepared to lose, but lose like a champion each time.
Dina plans to perform and tour this work after graduation.
dinagordon90 [at] gmail [dot] com (Contact via e-mail)
Laura Stasane
Laura Stasane is a maker, dramaturg and curator from Riga. Her graduation work "In Their Eyes" and thesis "Holding a bird, listening to a bear - searching for new modes of attention" deal with the ways we experience and encounter human and more than human world in the times of ecological crisis. Laura has explored haunted landscapes in the residency with Metropolis in Copenhagen and made a moving image work “Sweet Is The Island Breeze” during her stay at Røst Air in the arctic Norway for the international project “Y: Slow TV Cinema”.
Laura was part of the international performing arts festival Homo Novus in Riga for many years, working often with site-specific and community projects. Since 2020 she has been working with the topic of domestic violence in Latvia as an artist and activist raising awareness and creating in collaboration with many wonderful artists a series of works, most notably, the documentary installation and digital platform “Physical Evidence Museum” and the poetry and documentary stories book “No One Will Believe You”.
laurastasane [at] gmail [dot] com (Contact via e-mail)
Photo: Jenny Leyman