Master's programme students 2023
Zsófi Rebeka Kozma
Zsófi Rebeka Kozma is a Budapest-based perfomer and theatermaker with a background in social studies and acting. She makes theater which could not come alive without the presence of the audience and uses elements of performance art, autobiographical material and movement. She created her first solo as a Theater and Performance Art student at the Freeszfe Society which she performed at TESZT and THEALTER theater festivals. She co-founded the National Performance Art Theater Collective with two of her classmates, Noémi Szántusz and Mikolt Tózsa and she has been working with the collective and solo. She's worked with Trafó House, MU Theater, Stereo Akt, Marom Egyesület or the Hungary L!ve Foundation.
Photo: Daniel Sipos, at the Téridő Jam, Budapest
Filip Pawlak
Filip Pawlak is an independent, performance arts producer and self-advocate for artists with disabilities rights. For the last few years, he has been focusing on collaboration with the Europe Beyond Access project as an ambassador for its Polish projects, as well as co-curator of Learning Journeys in the frame of EBA since 2021.
In 2023 works as the production manager of Theatretreffen Festival in Berlin - 10Treffen programme. He has a strong background in performing and producing in various Polish theatres (International Culture Center Nowy Teatr in Warsaw, Academy of Theatre Arts Cracow - Faculty of Dance Theatre) and currently lives between Berlin and Warsaw. He is an IETM Member since 2021 through the IETM Global Connect programme and also took part in the IETM Campus in 2019.
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.
Jurrien van Rheenen
Jurrien van Rheenen graduated in 2014 from the theatre Academy in Maastricht. Her work explores new forms of socially engaged theater in which the specific knowledge behind themes and the experiences of the audience are the main focus.
"I have always seen theater as a way to research and address urgent themes, ever since I started performing and creating. I have explored different forms to translate themes such as domestic violence, depression and the disappearance of the welfare state into theatrical situations, where the audience is not just a spectator, but addressed and asked about their own experiences and responsibilities. For me theater is a way to bring about societal change and in my work I look for ways to set something in motion." she says.
Jurrien van Rheenen collaborated with other theater makers, who in their own way focused on research into social theatre. For example, she worked with Edit Kaldor, Merel Smitt and Ioana Tudor. In her work, Jurrien creates a balance between high-quality artistic and social theatre. As a maker, she is affiliated with Theater and production house De Generator, CC Amstel en de Theaterstraat.
Sall Lam Toro
Sall is a black trans queer unbinary antidisciplinary multimedia performance artist and organizer based in Copenhagen, Denmark, and, born and raised in Portugal to immigrant parents from Guiné-Bissau. They work with the mediums of performance, movement, sound, textual and visual art. Their work relates to producing and claiming the erotic as a way into decolonizing body(ies) while finding strategies to create more accessibility to multiple, non-linear, poetic universes of the sensual through equally disruptive, emotional and dissident forms. Their pieces strive to break with/interrupt the consequences of coloniality-based violence and oppression in the becoming of the body through rituals, economies of care and the senses while establishing intentional relationships with grief and death.
Photo: Arthur Aizikovich
Maryam Hashempour
Maryam Hashempour (b. 1998) is a performance practitioner, and dramaturg from Iran, enchanted by cities, people, and the intricacies of everyday life. She is someone who has inherited both fury and passion for life from her homeland - two concepts that give birth to resistance. To her, performance is a playful world for practicing resistance, a realm of collective experiences.
Throughout these years, in parallel with her education, She has tended to experience novel forms of art practices, most of which were site-specific and multidisciplinary, mainly produced in a collaborative form. This eventually led her to focus on practical and theoretical interactive urban performance design today.
The main subjects of the projects that she was a part of were inspired by the daily lives of the people and their social challenges, with an aim to give them a voice by bringing art back to the streets or reflecting it on the stage.
Maryam has recently completed her studies in the field of Dramatic Literature at Tehran University, and have finalized her thesis with a focus on the mechanics of collaborative playwriting in Devised Theatre.
Photo: Amirhossein Zarifian
Dina Gordon
Dina Gordon from Malmö has a background in classical ballet, contemporary dance and acting. She has worked and studied extensively in London with a degree from East 15 Acting School, as well as The Royal Swedish Ballet School in Stockholm. So far her work has centred around the high brow crossing paths with the low brow, - sometimes violently, sometimes comically and sometimes lovingly. She would describe what she does as theatre that is pushed and pulled between a distant and perhaps dusty past, a hard to catch present, and somewhere at the very end, - a future.
Photo: Ela Stipicic
Laura Stasane
Laura Stasane has worked as a dramaturg, curator and producer in performing arts, mostly as part of the international theatre festival “Homo Novus” in Riga. She often work in collaboration, with site specific projects, involving professionals and local communities. In her own work she has been exploring the subject of domestic violence, creating a documentary project “Physical Evidence Museum” and several other initiatives.
Laura is interested in hidden narratives and how art can help to reveal them, things and relations that are not obvious, yet impact the ways we live together in human and more than human world.