Barbara Greiner (she/her) has been part of the leadership team of Tanzfabrik Berlin BÜHNE since 2022 and part of the management team since 2024. Between 2007 and 2021, she accompanied numerous artists and independent projects in the fields of dance, choreographer and performance in Berlin and internationally as an independent producer. She has been a member of Rat für die Künste Berlin (Berlin's artist advisory council) since 2025.

She was a member of the board of ZTB Zeitgenössischer Tanz Berlin e.V. between 2017 and 2021, where she actively participated in multiple processes for better funding and working conditions in Berlin’s independent arts community, including, amongst others, the participatory process Runder Tisch Tanz. In addition, she was a co-initiator of Backbone Berlin, a platform that deals with the sustainable funding of artistic practice and its working structures. Barbara Greiner also works as a mentor and gives workshops for, amongst others, Tanzbüro Berlin and the Berlin Performing Arts Program.

Vera Shchelkina is a choreographer, dance artist and somatic movement educator. She completed her MA in choreography at the Ernst Busch University of Theater Arts Berlin in 2025. Prior to this, she completed training at Somatic Academy Berlin (2020–2023) as well as further education in contemporary dance and performance in Amsterdam and Moscow. Her academic background comprises German studies and literary studies.

Her artistic practice combines dance, performance, somatic practices and societal topics. Her projects include CO-TOUCH, My Ex(body), The Imposture Lab, SMRTъ, Vibrant matter, Witnessing it all happening for the last time, Everyone here is a bit of a horse, the collaborative project U.M.B.R.A. with Ming Poon as well as When the Roots Moved (choreographer, Kampnagel Sommerfestival 2025). These works were presented, amongst other places, in Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Stockholm as well as at the 2024 and 2025 editions of Potsdamer Tanztagen.

Parallel to this, she developed a number of mediation formats and taught. She curated the programming of Contemporary Dance for Deaf Community (GES-2, Moscow and Normale Tänze (Saint Petersburg). She has taught a variety of formats of body practices at HFBK Hamburg, Muthesius Kunsthochschule Kiel and projects of the group Chto Delat. Her research focuses on the body as a transpersonal experience, contact, embryology, death, remembrance and rebellion. She is currently developing methods of speculative somatic that combine embryology, perception, non-humanness and politics.

Christoph Winkler has worked internationally as a freelance choreographer since 1998. He graduated from the Berlin State Ballet School while East Germany still existed and performed in underground techno clubs in the early 1990s. After his ballet training, he studied choreography at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin and founded Klangkrieg Produktionen, a platform for experimental music, with which he produced a variety of musicians and curated festivals. He founded the agency BERLIN GOGOS in 2007, with which he brings contemporary dance to the free market on a commercial basis and with which he seeks to discuss the economic situation of dancers.

In his choreographic work, he deals with different topics such as copyrights, right-wing radical women, forms of protest, the relationship to one’s own child, community and European imagery, postcolonialism and the environment. He has worked as a mentor many times and regular supports emerging artists in his company or in other contexts. He received a George Tabori Prize in 2020 and he received the German Dance Prize in 2022, the most prestigious award for dance artists in Germany.

Hannah Juliane Steenbeck is an independent dancer and choreographer who lives in Berlin. Her artistic practice combines movement research with inter-style approaches, influenced by breaking, popping, house, contemporary dance and partnering. 

Since completing her studies as a fellow of HF ZUB Zurich, she has worked, amongst others, with Zookunft.Project, Merge Dance Collective as welll as the artists Laura Kassé, Béatrice Goetz, Shafiki Sseggayi, Malika Lamwersiek, Grete Pagan, Joy Alpuerto Ritter and Lukas Steltner. Juliane’s choreographic works have won numerous awards, amongst others, at the festival euro-scene Leipzig and at Tankstelle Bühne Luzern. Residencies at Lake Studios, ada Studio & Bühne and Radialsystem Berlin have accompanied her artistic development.

She is a co-founder of the collective corps sonores, which deals with acoustic and choreographic practices.

Hendrik Quast studied at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Gießen and works as a performer, director, voice-over artist and actor. He deals with the theatricalization of processes of growth. Design and craft techniques are placed in the space and time of theater and thus provoke a look at the usual natural perspectives. All of his performance works are marked by an intense dealing with materiality of selected objects of examination and the selected objects. Artistic work and its process is always defined as education and/or continuing education. In his collaboration with Maika Knoblich, “theatrical problems” are created from which situation- and site-specific happenings and actions are developed. In the close involvement of experts, professional expertise arises that is tested on the stage both in the form of actions as well as in the form of commenting language.

His works have been presented at, amongst others, Sophiensaelen Berlin, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Theater Skogen in Göteborg, the Festival a/d Werf as well as in the form of audio dramas on WDR. 

Lena Elsa Kolle was born in1995 in Mühlhausen in Thuringia. After completing a Bachelor’s degree in theater studies at the University of Leipzig, she began studying performing arts at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz in 2020. As an actor, she has worked, amongst others, with Lorenz Nolting (Schauspielhaus Graz, Moby Dick), Ed Hauswirth (the University of Music and Performing Arts Gr, Hin und Weg Litschau, Schauspielschultreffen 2023 TEMP:EST - im kommenden Sturm) and Ute Rauwald (A Midsummernightsdream).  In 2024, she founded the collective Filet together with Flora Egbonu and Johanna Schwaiger. In April 2025, she took part in the Nigerian dance and performance festival Artiste Crossroad in Lagos as a workshop participant and performer. None of My Business received its world premiere at Ballhaus Ost Berlin in 2025. She worked as a performer in this piece. Since then, she has worked as a freelance actor in Berlin.

Johanna Freiburg is originally from Hamburg and has lived in Berlin for more than 20 years. She studied at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Gießen in the 1990s. She is a member of She She Pop and the German-British Gob Squad Arts Collective. Both groups have worked collectively for some 30 years on the development of concepts, realization and performance of new works and have received numerous awards for this. In productions such as SuperNightShot, Western Society, Creation (Pictures for Dorian), Dancing with our Neighbours, Schubladen, Oratorium, Hexploitation, Alles Mögliche and numerous other pieces, Johanna is regularly on the stages of the Alliance of International Production Houses and beyond.

Johanna regularly shares the knowledge she has gained from her practice with Berlin’s independent performing arts community during events realized by the Berlin Performing Arts Program and is also active nationwide and internationally as a mentor and workshop facilitator.

https://www.gobsquad.com/
https://sheshepop.de/

Cochon de Cauchemar is a queer, visual and performance artist (theater, performance, dance) that works with movement, costume and set design, photography, video and autobiographical storytelling. After completing their studies in fashion and textile design in France, they decided instead to fully and completely dedicate themselves to their obsessive relationship to housework in order to conduct research into physical practices of control and the (self) domestication of the body in the domestic sphere. And so it came about that they turned their focus to the stage with the concept and character of “Nympho-Ménage”. Alongside an examination of obsessive-compulsive disorder, their work aims to investigate gender-specific socialization within the working class from the perspective of domestic and traumatic heritage. On the basis of their own experiences and those of people who work with them, it is important to them to tell stories that illuminate patriarchal violence, whereby the family–in its heteronormative definition–is discussed as the nucleus of this violence. From a queer-feminist, intersectional perspective, they explore how trauma shapes individual reality and can thus also influence collective realities.

Since 2022, they have taken part in multiple productions for Maxim Gorki Theater (with Lola Arias, Omer Krieger), HAU Hebbel am Ufer (with LASTESIS, Fantasia Malware) and Berliner Ringtheater (with Melanie Sien Min Lyn). In recent years, they have also performed their first short solo performance DUSTBUSTERS in Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Porto (Portugal) and Bern (Switzerland). In 2024, they presented their first duet theater piece IN SHREWS’ SHOES at Berliner Ringtheater.

Kerstin Oschabnig is an independent artist with a focus on aerial and partner acrobatics. After studying transcultural communication, she founded the association Akrosphäre in 2015 and realized her first productions Identity Taken (2016) und Exploring Identities (2018). She has lived and worked in Berlin since 2017 as a performer, producer and initiator, amongst others with collectives and productions including ConTakt, Re-building Communities, Juribonke, Luna und der Zitronenbaum and Kollektiv Klaus!. With her company, Cameo Acrobatix, she realizes her own productions and is currently a member of the artistic direction team at the training and producing venue Katapult.

https://www.cameo-acrobatix.net/de/kerstin-oschabnig/

Johanna Gorzellik is a contemporary circus artist living in Berlin with a focus on handstand. She made her first experiences in circus at a children’s and youth circus in Darmstadt. She spent eight months in 2018 at the ZipZap Circus School in Capetown, where she taught and was a part of different productions. Later she studied circus at the Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH) and graduated in 2024. 
As a performer, she had worked, amongst others, with Cirkus Cirkör (Cirkusliv, 2023 and 2024) as well as with Cirque Bouffon (Angelo, Carrousel, Chez Momo, 2025).
She was also featured in these productions with her solo handstand work and on the straps. In her artistic work, she is especially interested in slowness, micromovements and the principles of balance. Proceeding from the specific physicality of the handstand, she investigates the fine sensory processes that allow balance. By making these inner processes visible, she opens up a different perception of time and presence.

Leicy Valenzuela is an actor, director and theater eduator. She was born in Santiago de Chile and has lived and worked in Berlin since 2011. In her artistic research and practice, she is concerned with the training of stage presence, the current condition as well as the concept of the “imperfect” as a performative element.

Her work on stage began at Teatro Nacional de Chile and led her to Berlin in collaboration with collectives like Rimini Protokoll and She She Pop as well as to institutions like HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Deutsche Theater and Theater an der Parkaue. She is a co-founded of Pink Valley, a Chilean-German performance collective that has been working internationally since 2009. Thematically, her work is located at the crossroads of fate, time, radical empathy and networking with a special focus on interdisciplinary formats for empowerment, gender, immigration and children’s rights. As a guest instructor, she has taught, amongst other institutions, at the Berlin University of the Arts as well as the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts (HfMDK).

Since 2024, she has coordinated the area of house club & schools at HAU Hebbel am Ufer – a location for encounters and space for artistic investigation and experiments by, with and for young people in which local and international artistic develop interdisciplinary projects jointly with young people over the course of multi-week residencies.

Alice Lena Hiepko (she/her) is a freelance director, performer and culture manager. In her artistic practice, she works at the interface of queer-feminist perspectives, collective work processes and participatory theater formats. She sees theater as a space for exchange, self-empowerment and mutual learning – especially in work with children and young people as well as in international, transdisciplinary projects with a decolonial perspective.

She studied cultural studies and aesthetic practice with a focus in theater and media at the University of Hildesheim. There she founded the performance collective SPLITTER with classmates and realized the devised work Wer ist denn schon: OPEN. In addition, she is a founding member of the network PENGO – International Cultural and Artistic Network e.V., with which she has been involved in international exhibition and performance projects. Parallel to this, she has worked as an actor in the independent performing arts community in Hanover, at Klecks Theater e.V. and with Theater Fensterzurstadt, amongst others.

She is currently studying in the MA program for culture and media management at the Free University of Berlin and completed an Erasmus semester in the International Dramaturgy program at the University of Amsterdam. She spent four years touring with the sex education piece UNTENRUM through schools in Lower Saxony. From this practice, she is currently developing a queer-feminist classroom piece about sex education for Berlin schools.

Marielle Schavan (born in 1991 in Dusseldorf) studied creative writing and directing the arts and media at the University of Hildesheim. She is a founding member of the queer feminist theater collective Henrike Iglesias with which she has developed numerous performances since 2012 and tourned both nationally and internationally. In addition, she works as a writer, performer and dramaturg on independent theater projects and discourse formats, such as the feminist dream school ACADEMY, the inclusive performance café KAFi Q with actors from Theater HORA at Gessnerallee Zürich and with the choreographer and director Olivia Hyunsin Kim.

In the winter, she celebrated the premiere of the performance LIARS with Henrike Iglesias, Olympia Bukkakis and Olivia Hyunsin Kim at Sophiensaele (Berlin), which dealt with the amplification of gender-specific violence in social networks. In March 2026, she part of the artistic direction team of HALL OF FANS, a piece developed by Henrike Iglesias and Mona Louisa-Melinka Hempel at Jungen Nationaltheaters Mannheim for audience members aged 13 and older about being a fan.

Nora Decker (born in 1985 in Görlitz, East Germany) is an actor, performer and artistic researcher. She studied acting at the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media and graduated with a certificate in 2011.

Alongside her work at renowned repertory and ensemble theaters, she has developed her own participatory performance projects where she combines societal topics with artistic practice. Decker sees herself as an amplifier, organizer and researcher working at the interface of art and societal discourse. Characteristic of her work is the translation of everyday actions, especially those of care work, into theatrical images as well as the creation of acoustic spaces through vocally generated sounds.

Her artistic interests at the moment are focused on processes of aging from the perspective of feminist gerontology where she brings questions about the body, care and transience into collectively experiential formats.

Lisanne Grotz is a freelance production manager. After studying German-French culture studies as well as culture management/culture tourism, she first worked in the hotel industry before starting to work independently in 2014. She began working for the Berlin Performing Arts Program of LAFT Berlin and, simultaneously, in the field of production of a variety of projects within Berlin’s independent performing arts community, such as the festivals FRATZ International and Augenblick mal!, amongst others. She had a variety of responsibilities within the Berlin Performing Arts Program, most recently the project management of the ESF-funded projects in the fields of advisement and qualification from 2018 to 2021. She founded the production management company xplusdrei with Marit Buchmeier in 2017. As a team, they have worked together since then as production management for and with numerous projects, groups and festivals, including, amongst others, Turbo Pascal, Flinn Works and the festival FRATZ International.

Marit Buchmeier is a freelance production manager. She collected her first experiences in production management and curation at the international festival ARENA der jungen Künste in Erlangen while studying theater and media studies. She worked as a dramaturg and theater educator at Theater an der Parkaue – Junges Staatstheater Berlin from 2012 to 2014. Beginning in 2015, Marit worked in different roles in Berlin’s independent performing arts community, amongst others for Theater o.N. or the festivals FRATZ International and Augenblick mal!. Parallel to this, she worked as an editor for the Berlin Performing Arts Program of LAFT Berlin from 2017 to 2021. In 2017, she founded the production management company xplusdrei with Lisanne Grotz. As a team, they have worked together since then  for and with numerous projects, groups and festivals, including, amongst others, Turbo Pascal, Flinn Works and the festival FRATZ International.

Oliver Toktasch is a director, dramaturg and artistic director. After completing his training as an actor, his path did not lead initially to classic theater institutions. A meaningful station in his career was Kater Holzig in Berlin, where he developed the cultural programming. During a time where club culture was reformulating its aspirations as a space for art and society, formats were created there located between art, subculture, technology and political publicity, in collaboration with the Chaos Computer Club, amongst others. He then worked at Hans-Otto-Theater Potsdam for many years. There, he developed and accompanied long-term projects at the interface of ensemble, civil society and institution and concerned himself with the question of how participatory processes could be permanently incorporated in the structures of a repertory and ensemble theater.

Since 2022, he has worked together with Ufuk Güldü to establish Ballhaus Prinzenallee in Berlin-Wedding as a production venue for the independent performing arts community and is responsible for the development of the programming of the institution as the artistic director.  As the son of a Turkish guest worker and a German mother, he still continues to deal with the question of who is visible in cultural spaces and who is not. This perspective shapes both the orientation of the theater as well as his own work. With the mit.mach.bühne, he has also developed a long-term community practice in which different groups are continuously incorporated in the structure of the theater. He is less interested in individual production than in the development of spaces in which artistic, social and political processes come together.

Ufuk Güldü (1975) is an actor, director, theater education and artistic director. His work takes place at the intersection of theater, cultural education and societal participation. After completing his training as an actor, he began to develop his own structures for artistic and social work early on. With the founding of Theater 28, he created a platform that made Turkish artists especially visible. With the Akademie der kreativen Bildung, he created an education institution where theater educators could receive intercultural competence. His educational focuses were adopted by the German Federal Association of Theater Education and are now a fixed component of education nationwide. With Interkulturell Aktiv e.V., he also founded the association that serves the legal entity behind Ballhaus Prinzenallee. A focus of his work rests in the support of young people as well as the development of long-term education and participatory formats. In his directing work as well, he connects societal questions with personal stories and perspectives from a diverse immigrant society. As curator of the Turkish-German Theater Festival, he has dedicated himself to the exchange of different cultural perspectives for the last eleven years.

Since 2022, he has developed Ballhaus Prinzenallee in Berlin together with Oliver Toktasch as a production venue for the independent performing arts community and creates space there for artistic positions that are often underrepresented in the cultural sector. He is the managing director and artistic director there. For Ufuk Güldü, theater is most of all a place of encounters. He is less interested in the representation of diversity than in the creation of structures in which different experiences, stories and perspectives can become a self-evident part of the public culture.

Flora Udochi Egbonu (*1999) is an Afro-Austrian performer, translator and director. After studying geodesy and geoinformation, she studied performing arts at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. She completed an exchange year at Conservatoire Nationale Supérieur d’Art Dramatique in Paris as well as at Conservatoire Royale in Brussels. Focuses of her work are the effects of colonial systems, postcolonial societies and feminist perspectives.

She has worked at a variety of repertory and ensemble theaters such as Schauspielhaus Graz, Staatstheater Mainz, Staatstheater Darmstadt and Burgtheater Wien, but her greatest interest is in the independent performing arts community. In 2024, she was the co-founder of the Berlin collective Filet, from which the work None of My Business emerged, amongst other works. International collaboration makes up a large part of her work. She created the project The Future Is What? in collaboration with the Nigerian director Ridwan Rasheed. She participated in the Nigerian Artiste Crossroad Festival in 2025. She lives and works as a freelance artist in Berlin.

Philine Rinnert develops scenographies, installations and visual concepts at the interface of art, science and activism. She marks spaces of transition and transformation and searches for alternative forms of encounters and artistic dialogue. She is currently concentrating on a long-term series of projects that deal with the perception of resources and their geo-scientific backgrounds (Tattooing the Earth, brut Wien 2023, together with Gerhild Steinbuch, The Black Hole Image, Valkhof Museum Nijmegen/Dokfest Kassel 2025, with Ian Purnell, Heavy Metals, intervention in a decommissioned mine in Mitrovica, Kosovo.) 
She will present a research project about rare earth in the Berlin Museum of Natural History in May 2026.
Since studying stage design at the Berlin University of the Arts and the St. Petersburg Theater Academy, she has worked as a scenographer for a variety of international productions and is currently working with the performance collective She She Pop. Her diverse interdisciplinary fields of work come together with her focus on the scenographies of assembly and communication.

She teaches in the stage and costume design program at the HfBK Dresden Academy of Fine Arts.

Carolin Pflüger is a set and costume designer as well as art mediator. In her artistic practice, she sees material objects as performers – especially when dealing with trash, material cycles and the question of how materials shape actions and perceptions. She plays with these dynamics and develops spaces from transitions, from materials that are often at home in other contexts and whose origins interest her. Her practice takes place at the intersection of set, installation and social practice. As a co-founder of the artist collective QUO and the set design duo strolling______, she works in public space, collects, arranges and intervenes. Her projects question attention, rests, the in-between and the political in everyday life. Her experiences in inclusive and education contexts shape her approach: openness for diverse forms of perception and the invitation to participate in them.

She studied art and special education in Leipzig and Berlin, visual art at the Berlin University of the Arts as well as set design/scenic space at TU Berlin. She has worked on a freelance basis at theaters including Theaterhaus Jena, Theater Bremen, TAK Theater Liechtenstein and Theater Freiburg since 2022. Her work includes set and costume designs for directing projects by, amongst others, Walter Bart, Leon Pfannenmüller, Nanine Maria Kok and Pina Bergemann/Anna Gschnitzer. The production Die Hundekot-Attacke (directed by Walter Bart/Wunderbaum) was invited to the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen ánd Heidelberger Stückemarkt.

Sina Kießling studied acting at the  Rostock University of Music and Drama and then worked as an actor at Theater Heilbronn and Theater Lübeck from 2003 to 2009. She has worked as a freelance actor at Maxim-Gorki-Theater Berlin, Volksbühne Berlin, Schauspielhaus Bochum, Volkstheater München, Theater Basel and many others since 2009.
She completed her studies in cultural management at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Hamburg in 2016. Since then, she has also worked as production manager and producer, including with Fabian Hinrichs for the Foreign Affairs Festival, Union Universal Hamburg in 2013 and Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop Berlin. She has worked as the producer for the theater collective machine eX since 2015.
She has also cooperated with the Nordwind Festival, the Swiss choreographer Simone Aughterlony, the choreographer Kat Válastur, the dancer and choreographer Ligia Lewis as well as the performers Janne Gregor and Anan Fries. She is also an external advisor for the German Federal Cultural Foundation for the funding programs Tanzland and Jupiter as well as an instructor in the field of production management.

Nina Vieten (she/her) was born in Munich in 1996 and studied acting from 2016-2020 at the Zurich University of the Arts. During her studies, she spent two months at a theater school in São Paulo. She was the 2018 winner of the advancement award of the Armin Ziegler Foundation. She was a member of the Schauspielstudio at Theater Chemnitz during the 2019/2020 season. In December 2020, she created her first digital peformance, Eu tenho saudade, for the 2020 edition of the theater festival SATYRIANAS in São Paulo and was responsible for the concept, text and music, alongside the performance. In 2021, she worked collectively on the production I DO THE SAME JOB BLEEDING at Gostner Hoftheater in Nuremberg. She was a member of the ensemble of Theater Kiel from December 2021 to September 2024, where you also premiered her monologue evening Mein Leben – (D)ein Traum.  Most recently, she was responsible for the direction and text of the production (Ver)kümmern at Gostner Hoftheater Nuremberg in November 2025.

Nina Vieten works in the fields of acting, text and directing. In her work, she dedicates herself to feminist and societally critical topics that she examines proceeding from personal questions led by research, conversations and reflection from different perspectives.

Thorsten Schlenger was born in 1979 in Paderborn and has been the artistic director of Theater unterm Dach since 2021. Prior to that, he managed the art festival 48 Hours Neukölln, Berlin’s largest independent art festival, together with Dr. Martin Steffens for nine years. In 2009, he founded BRAND – Vereine für theatrale Feldforschung e.V. together with Katja von der Ropp and Benedikt Haubrich. There, he developed numerous site-specific performances and projects at the crossroads of theater, urban space and societal reflection.

Schlenger studied theater studies, literary studies and education at the Free University of Berlin as well as directing at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna.

Fabienne Dür is a theater maker and playwright and lives in Berlin.
She writes plays for adult and young audiences that have been premiered at, amongst others ,Staatstheater Kassel, Stadttheater Gießen, Schauspiel Stuttgart, and which have won multiple awards. She worked as a dramaturg at Vagantenbühne Berlin from 2020 to 2024, where she also directed her first projects. She plans to work on her own projects in which she will bring together writing and directing over the course of the Mentoring Program.