Anajara Amarante is a chronically ill, queer Brazilian artist. The primary medium of her work is the moving body. Her professional interests are personal and political: queer, dissident bodies, marginalized communities and artistic practices. Her most important artist practice concentrates on the field of the performing arts with some brief excursions in the visual arts and earlier formations in biology and communication. As a Brazilian who lives in Europe, Anajara is interested in people with a migration background, the construction of their identities and postcolonialism as well as the construction of joy, inclusion and diversity.

Nagao Akemi is a PoC choreographer, dancer, artist and Slavist who was worked with the topic of discrimination and inequality in her productions since 2015. Her artistic interests rest in the research and reevaluation of the complex conflicts between social structures and individual philosophy and psychology. Her key works B OR D ER S?, JUICY ♡ METAMORPHOSIS and DIAMOND -–The Crossing Point of Money and Spirituality deal with topics such as discrimination, sexuality and the relationship between money and humanity. Her choreographies present an unmistakable and optimistic view of these topics.

Her dance background includes ballet, Japanese folk, street, soul, contemporary dance and improvisation. Akemi combines diverse and minimalistic movement. She has worked with numerous choreographers, directors and artists in Europe, Asia and the USA as a dancer since 2010, including Choy Ka Fai, Yoshiko Chuma, Felix Meyer-Christian, Joan Jonas, Hans Peter Kuhn, Lemi Ponifasio and others. As a choreographer, she has worked with a variety of artists, such as Johanna Ackva, Anna Kubelik, Min Oh, Giovanni Verga and others. Since 2020, she has practiced and moderated Saturday Digestion with Sabrina Huth in a variety of settings, including HZT Berlin, Ponderosa Stolzenhagen and the Berlin University of the Arts. She completed the M.A. in Choreography (maC) at HZT Berlin in 2021.

Antonio Cerezo studied theater studies and acting at the National University of Mexico, as well as acting and directing at HB Studio in New York City. He has worked professionally as an actor and director in Mexico, the USA and Europe (La MaMa Theater, Lincoln Center, Mabou Mines and St. Ann’s Warehouse) since 1992. He has lived and worked in Germany as an actor, director, puppeteer, choreographer and instructor since 2007. He has performed and produced at theaters including Berliner Festspielen, Volksbühne Berlin, Thalia Theater Hamburg, Theaterhaus Jena, Sophiensaelen, Kampnagel Hamburg, Schaubude Berlin and Hebbel Theater Berlin.
He received Intercultural Project Funding from the Berlin Senate in 2016 for There’s No Home Like Place, the three-year stipend of the Mexican Ministry of Culture, FONCA, from 2018 to 2020 and received a research grant in the field of the performing arts/dance from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture in 2020.

Antonio has been a part of the Berlin-based KMZ KOLLEKTIV since 2021, which, with productions like Kaffee mit Zucker? (Coffee With Sugar?) and Fünf Exponate (Five Samples), creates a unique connection between object and material theater and political and decolonial discourse. In addition, he has been a member of the national system of creators Sistema de Apoyo a la Creación Mexiko since 2023.

Cosima Sophia Crupskin

Liz Williams has worked as a professional circus artist since 2005. She has worked all throughout Germany at theaters including Wintergarten Varieté, Chamäleon Theater, Staatstheater Ingolstadt, Podewil, Friedrichsbau, GOP as well as at numerous events and festivals. Her singular work is based upon her background as a professional dancer, actor and student of 5Q and martial arts. Born in Florida, she began her dance training at the PCCA Performing Arts High School. She moved to New York and continued her studies at the Conservatory for Dance of the State University of New York in Purchase, New York, where she graduated Magna cum Laude. In New York, she danced for the choreographers, David Grenke, Rebecca Hilton and Howard Katz. Due to an unexpected opportunity, Liz was cast in a role in a theater production where she had to climb a rope and she started a career as an aerial artist.

Rixa Rottonara is an interdisciplinary artist and an aerial artist trained at the Etage in Berlin. She works in interdisciplinary projects and has worked as a director and performer in her own productions under the name Rottenart Productions together with a variety of artists since 2018. In October of 2020, she worked as a dancer and choreographer in the 8th  intervention: Fiammetta from the series Was träumen wir (What Are We Dreaming Of) at Vereinigten Bühnen Bozen. In 2021, she constructed the open air installation Crossroad Influences as a part of this which was used during the opening of the biennial 50x50x50 in Franzensfeste Fortress and was then exhibited for three months afterward. She is currently working on new projects in Berlin and South Tyrol, where she often considers new techniques of working, such as, for example, the research Digital Flux, funded by the Nationalen Performance Netz, in which she investigates how choreographies can be developed with microcontrollers attached to the body.

Franziska Werner is a dramaturg and curator. She studied theater studies and cultural communication art history and European ethnology at Humboldt University of Berlin (M.A.) and Etudes Théâtrales at Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris. She has worked as a freelance dramaturg, curator and production manager with various artists in Berlin as well as for festivals and producing institutions throughout Germany. She was the artistic director of Sophiensaele Berlin from 2011 until the summer of 2023 and will serve as the artistic director of the Impulse Theater Festival for the editions from 2025 to 2027.
Alongside various appointments as a juror, she is active as an advisor and mentor in a variety of programs and bodies, including Rat für die Künste Berlin (Berlin’s Artist Advisory Council), the advisory council for the department of theater and dance of the Goethe-Institut, the program Frauen in Kultur und Medien (Women in Culture and Media) of the Deutsche Kulturrat (the German Cultural Council) or the Performing Arts Program of LAFT Berlin.

Masha Sapizhak, a theater maker, performance artist and arts practitioner who is currently living in Berlin. Her interests in her work rest especially in the reflection upon social and political contexts: human rights, environmental justice, nature and the effects of violence on a variety of levels. 

As a director and creator of performance concepts, she has now realized over 20 productions in a variety of regions in Russia, in Georgia, Germany as well as in collaboration with colleagues from Finland, Norway and Great Britain. In Berlin, she has presented her work at Ballhaus Prinzenallee, English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center (as part of the 2024 Expo Festival) as well as at Theater Strahl.
From time to time, she takes on the role of curator/program director of art events and the moderation of workshops in order to make the creative process easier for others. For her, the most important aspect of all kinds of art is the creation of a space for communication and open dialogue as well as practices for the collective overcoming of existential loneliness. She is interested in interdisciplinary art and the connection of different genres. Currently, she is focusing more intensely on art and creative bodies in digital spaces.

Heinrich Horwitz is a director, choreographer and actor. Heinrich realizes productions in the independent performing arts community, at repertory and ensemble theaters as well as in the field of new music. Heinrich studied directing and choreography at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin. Heinrich is the winner of the 2023 Tabori Prize. Heinrich was invited to the Heidelberger Stückemarkt and was awarded the Dance and Theater Prize of the city of Stuttgart and the state of Baden-Württemberg.
In 2021, the Amazon myth was created, in which Amazon Rising, a queer feminist parade through Berlin was the central focus. In 2022, Heinrich premiered HAUS, a music cycle by Sarah Nemtsovs, at the Ruhr Triennial. In 2023, the 24-hour performance FLIPPER premiered at Ballhaus Ost. In addition, Heinrich’s productions have been invited to Staatstheater Kassel, the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Deutschland Funk Köln, to festivals including Frau Musica Nova Köln, Schönes Wochenende Düsseldorf, Internationales Musikfest Hamburg, Tanztage Berlin, MusikInstallation Nürnberg and Ultima Oslo. In 2022 and 2023, Heinrich worked on the project Freedom Collective, an immersive music theater project in cooperation with Musiktheater im Revier Gelsenkirchen, Theater Bremen and Staatstheater Darmstadt.
Alongside Heinrich's work as a director and choreographer, Heinrich also works continuously as an actor in theater, opera, film and television. In the 2023/2024 season, Heinrich performed at Schaubühne Berlin and Staatsoper Hannover, amongst other theaters. Heinrich has worked as an instructor in the directing department of the Ludwigsburg Academy of Art since 2022/2023.

https://www.heinrich-horwitz.com

Mars Löffler was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1989. They are a transdisciplinary artist and critical sci-fi enthusiast who works in the fields of performance and installation both as a soloist as well as in collaborations. They studied at the Braunschweig Academy of Visual Arts as well as within the Master’s program Life Art Forms at the Nuremberg Academy of Visual Arts. In their artistic work, they conduct research into interspecies transformation processes, led by the compulsion to destroy, reinterpret and corrupt categories in history, methodologies and the production of knowledge in the interconnected areas of nature and anthropology. Somatic practices, costume design, language and sound are examined as transgressive and immersive means to experience potentials and modes for physical transitions beyond their corporeal forms as well as to form new bodies.

They are currently working collaboratively with Sam Godfrey on an installation and performance series in multiple chapters. In an act of critical re-enchantment, the cyclical, cosmo-ecological relationship between the human body and other forms of life will be examined and decoded with the help of the transdisciplinary system of knowledge of alchemy as part of the search for trans and non-binary worldviews, accumulative, poetic time and communal spaces.

Johanna Freiburg was born in Hamburg in 1971 and lives in Berlin. She studied at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Gießen from 1991 to 1997 She is a member of She She Pop and the German-British artist collective Gob Squad. She has performed in numerous pieces that have toured around the world. For some 30 years, she has worked collectively on the development of concepts, realization and performance of new works. Johanna passes on the knowledge she has gained from this as a mentor working on an international basis and regularly shares it with Berlin’s independent performing arts community via events of the Berlin Performing Arts Program.

Nadja Duesterberg was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1983 and lives in Berlin. She has worked as an independent actor and performer in NRW and Berlin since 2009 and as a cook since 2007.
She was awarded the Kölner Darsteller*innen Preis, Cologne’s award for performers, in 2017. She has worked regularly with Kollektiv Subbotnik since 2016. In 2019, she premiered her first production on her own, Homesick! (concept by Michikazu Matsune) at FFT Düsseldorf. An international co-production by Jun Tsutsui at FFT Düsseldorf and the Kyoto Art Center followed the same year Nadja Duesterberg asks herself in her work: Who is visible where and why? Where is our history? Who tells it?
In 2020, a TAKE CARE residency provided her with the opportunity to conduct research into patriarchal, misogynist and discriminating structures in her everyday working life as an actor in the independent performing arts. In 2022, she began an additional piece of performative research at FFT Düsseldorf about eating with Expect a Tiger; in 2023, her work Except a Tiger was invited to the showcase at the Impulse Theater Festival. In 2024, together with Svea Kirschmeier, she founded the performance label TIGERS’ KITCHEN, with which she, along with additional artists, performed at the 2024 Impulse Theater Festival within the urban project SCHIMM CITY.

Lea-Sophie Schiel was born in 1986 and is a theater scholar, performer and philosopher. In 2011, she was persuaded to be a part of the founding of the performance collective Hysterisches Globusgefühl which has been the center of her artistic work ever since. Before that, she studied theater and media studies and philosophy at FAU University of Erlangen–Nuremberg and the University of Bern. Alongside internships at larger theaters, she realized a variety of theater and performance projects: amongst other projects, she held curatorial responsibility for the Arena Festival and worked as a guest performer with the collective Dramazone. From 2012 to 2014, she worked as an academic associate within the Institute for Theater and Media Studies and the Office for Gender and Diversity of FAU University of Erlangen–Nuremberg. She was a grantee of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation from 2014 to 2018 and received her doctorate from the Free University of Berlin with a dissertation on the topic of sex as performance. As an instructor, she continues to teach today at the intersection of (feminist) theory and practice. She has taught, amongst other institutions of higher education, at FAU University of Erlangen–Nuremberg, the University of Hildesheim, FU Berlin, FH Mittweida, the University of Cologne as well as the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. She was a member of the jury of the Berlin Performing Arts Festival in 2020.
From September of 2020 to September of 2021, she was a postdoc grantee of the FFL scholarship at FAU University of Erlangen–Nuremberg and conducted research about collective writing processes within the context of contemporary feminist performance art. In 2022, she received two research grants from Fonds Darstellende Künste on the topics of "Die humorvolle Performance - ein Recherchevorhaben über Frauen*"(The Humorous Performance - A Research Project About Women*), "Feminismus und Humor in der darstellende Kunst" (Feminism and Humor in the Performing Arts) as well as "On Darkness oder: Lassen sich Depressionen verkollektivieren?" (On Darkness or: Can Depressions Be Collectivized?).

 

Carla-Frieda Nettelnbreker works as a performer, activist and actor. She studied societal and business communication at the Berlin University of the Arts as well as acting at the Bern Academy of Arts. Since the completion of her studies in 2021, projects have been created with, amongst others, the director Maximillian Wigger, the artist collective Mailand-Innenhof, the choreographer Deva Schubert or, most recently, the participatory performance "Zu Tisch" in collaboration with Johanna Ackva and Ana Halina Ringleb (lounge of the Deutsches Theater as the opening of the 2024 Burning Issues Conference).
At the moment, she is conducting research within the process-oriented research project WUTRÄUME (Spaces for Rage) with the duo decker:nettelnbreker into the potential of rage from a queer feminist perspective. Excerpts from this have been able to be presented in the performance space Fortuna Wetten as well as during the feminist table conversation "zusammen verdauen" (digesting together) by Ana Halina Ringleb at Kornbrennerei Hainholz in Hanover.
Carla-Frieda Nettelnbreker is a member of the Verein der Bühnenmütter*, the Association of Stage Mothers, and founded a mentoring program here which provides a safe framework in which a focused exchange at eye level regarding the compatibility of care work and stage work is possible. In addition to this, she published an article about this in the magazine Schauspiegel des BFFS in the special edition "Frauen* weibliche Perspektiven aus der Branche" (Women* Female Perspectives from the Industry). In the spring of 2024, she facilitated a workshop together with the actor Johanna Bantzer entitled "Familie und Theater?!" (Family and Theater?!), hosted by the Residenztheater for the ensemble members of this repertory and ensemble theater in Munich. She took part in the artist lab "WITH CARE. Action Lab zwischen Theater, Publika und Sorgearbeit" (WITH CARE. Action Lab Between Theater, Audience and Care Work) as a participating expert, which emerged from the tool kit With Care.

Martin Stiefermann is a choreographer, mentor, curator and concept creator. Following his training and work at the Hamburgische Staatsoper, he has worked as a choreographer alternating between dance direction positions at repertory and ensemble theaters (Theater Kiel, Oldenburgisches Staatstheater) and as a choreographer in the independent performing arts community, especially with his Berlin-based group MS Schrittmacher, which has now existed for 26 years. He directed the residency program at Schloss Bröllin from 2018 to 2021 and has been part of the leadership team of the TANZPAKT project MECKLENBURG-VORPOMMERN TANZT AN since 2018. He has worked as an artistic partner of the label Art Hacking® since 2019 and realizes workshops on the topic of the transfer of artistic processes to business questions. He started the project BRUCHSTÜCKE (FRAGMENTS) in 2022, which is dedicated to the task of established dance and performance in the rural area of Oderbruch. He is a co-founder and board member of MS Schrittmacher-Landgang e. V., a founding member of ZTB e. V. and is a member of LAFT Berlin e. V. and also served as a member of its board from 2014 and 2018. He was a member of the Bundesdeutschen Ballett- und Tanztheaterdirektor*innen-Konferenz (BBTK, the German Federal Ballet and Dance Theater Directors Conference) from 2001 to 2006. He has been a member of schloss bröllin e. V. since 2015, a board member of Tanzregion Mecklenburg-Vorpommern e. V. since 2018 and is also a representative within the network TANZ WEIT DRAUßEN. Since 2022, he has been part of the core group responsible for the establishment of TANZINITIATIVE Brandenburg and has been a member of the board of the newly founded association Tanzinitiative-Brandenburg e. V. since the spring of 2024.

Felix Falczyk and Johanna Herschel are performance artists and work together as the collective Deepfake Situations. They are interested in strategies and tactics for the misuse of (everyday) situations. Together with the audience, they construct situations in which new patterns of behavior are tested, learned or simulated. 
Their work has been presented, amongst other places, at Mousonturm Frankfurt, Ballhaus Ost Berlin, zeitraumexit Mannheim, SFB Intervenierende Künste, as part of the International Schiller Days festival at Nationaltheater Mannheim, the ARENA-Festival Erlangen, Zeitzeug-Festival Bochum and at TanzArt-Festival in Gießen. The work of Falczyk and Herschel became international at the Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje and it has also been invited to the confluence-Festival in Stockholm; this was followed by presentations and artistic research residencies at the New Centre for Research & Practice and the School for Politics and Critique.
Felix Falczyk studied at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Gießen and also studied theater directing at the Aristoteles University in Thessaloniki. Johanna Herschel studied at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Gießen and also studied philosophy and gender studies at the Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities in Skopje.

www.deepfakesituations.org

Mateusz Szymanówka

Pamela Moraga earned her B. A. degree in choreography and dance at the Humanismo Cristiano University in Santiago de Chile in 2015. She has been active in Berlin’s independent performing arts community since 2018. Her works deal with contemporary social and political topics that she translates into dance through her own unique interpretation. Together with other independent artists, she develops and presents multidisciplinary projects on Berlin’s stages.
Pamela began to produce her own dance pieces in 2017. Her most notable productions include Un salto de fe and No es Necesario (both in 2017), Blue (2018 and 2019) and Manual de Humanidad. Volumen piel (2018). In 2019, she presented a revised version of her work To Take the Leap in Berlin, which, amongst other things, emphasized the creative collective Tanz den Widerstand.  Her work as an independent artist has been supported by Dachverband Deutschland. This has allowed the creation of works such as Suspended Earth (the 2023 edition of PAF) and LATINX.
In the year 2024, Pamela is concentrating on examining her South American roots by combining Latin American urban styles, especially reggaeton, with contemporary dance techniques. This fusion emphasizes the cultural and rhythmic elements of reggaeton and simultaneously integrates the precision of contemporary dance.

Ming Poon works with applied choreography, which he uses as an instrument to pose questions relating to the social and political relationships of the body and to organize them anew. He is especially interested in the activation of marginalized bodies in order to provide resistance against hegemonial structures and to break through them, which he does by using choreographic strategies that contain decolonialization, vulnerability, care, queerness and failure. For him, movement refers to the ability of the body to move, act and effect changes. His works are interactive and designed to be collaborative and generally take the form of shared performances, public interventions and intimate encounters. His practice is inspired by the Buddhist concept of mutual dependency and care, by Judith Butler’s resistance in vulnerability, by Jack Halberstam’s queer art of failure, by Augusto Boal’s theater of the oppressed and by Nicolas Bourriaud’s micro utopias.
In 2020, he initiated the Asian Performing Artists Lab (APAL) as a platform for artists with Asian backgrounds living in Berlin/Germany to network, exchange experiences and to collaborate with each other. He is founding member of United Networks, a non-profit organization that intends to establish a nationwide network of marginalized BiPoC artists, culture workers, activists and community organizers that work in Germany in the field of the performing arts. He is also part of Urgent Bodies, a collective that attempts to bring together dance and activist practices.

Abdalwahab Hmidan, also known as Hoba (he/him), is a dancer, circus artist and trainer from Nablus who now lives in Berlin. His artistic work combines traditional practices with contemporary expression and searches for new forms of post-migrant art. Following his training at the Nablus Circus School, he founded the performance group The Brothers in Palestine and facilitated dance and circus workshops there for children and young people. Hoba has been connected closely with Stereo 48 in Ramallah since 2019, a company that merges contemporary dance with traditional dabke and cooperates with international theaters and companies.

In Ramallah, Hoba was an advisor with the GIZ CPS Parkour Climbing Project, where he adapted the parkour climbing concept for local contexts. He has supported the Cabuwazi Circus School in Berlin since 2023 and supports the integration of children from accommodations for the displaced. Hoba is currently working in Berlin as a choreographic assistant on a circus project funded by Berlin’s Senate Department for Culture and is part of the company 101Concrete in Potsdam.

Nicole Schuchardt

Katharina Scheidtmann works as a dance artist, choreographer, dance educator and instructor. Having studied at the University of the Arts ArtEZ Arnheim (B. A. dance education) and the Free University of Berlin (M. A. dance studies), she is increasingly placing her artistic focus on the combination of body, contact and space. This interest is not only reflected on stage. As a dance facilitator and instructor, she teaches at educational institutions such as Seneca Intensiv, Bauhaus University Weimar, the Alica Salomon Hochschule or TanzZeit. In doing so, her interdisciplinary approach is alway in focus.

As a choreographer and dancer, Katharina Scheidtmann has worked with, amonst others, Erik Kaiel, Paula Walta, Toshiki Okada and Sasha Waltz & Guests. She worked for Sasha Waltz & Guests as a production manager in 2022. From 2016 to 2020, she handled the producing duties as well as the artistic direction of the Kama Dance Company. Alongside her artistic work, she also places a great value on exchange and networking within the independent dance community. Arising from this motivation, she founded Connective FREYAS in May 2023 together with other dance artists based in Berlin. The collective presented its first joint project, Fluid Bodies, Tidal Voices the following September. An additional result of the collaboration with Berlin-based artists is the interdisciplinary project Ghosts Are My Reality (2023). It combines movement, video and sound in order to conduct research into the phenomenon of dreaming. Together with the dancer Maria Focaraccio and the video artist Theresa Maria Forthaus, Katharina Scheidtmann creates for this project an imaginary landscape that uses the body as a medium in order to capture the essence of dreaming.

Theresa Reiwer (she/her) is an artist who works with new media and (post)digital theater and is also a director and set designer. She creates narrative spaces with digital expansions that thoroughly examine the poles between the analog and digital worlds and balance the boundaries between reality and fiction. She has conducted critical artistic research into artificial intelligence since 2018, both as a mirror of societal paradigms as well as a projection surface for speculative future utopias. Theresa studied film studies and theater studies at the FU Berlin, film at Bilgi Istanbul and independent art/set and costume design at the KHB. She has received stipends and grants from the German federal and state levels, including the Berlin emerging artist scholarship program Elsa Neumann, the research grant of the ADK as well as at of Berlin’s Senate Department for Culture, research and project funding form Fonds DaKü, the HKF as well as from districts in Berlin as well as private foundations. Her own productions have been presented multiple times in Berlin (Ballhaus Ost, Berlin Art Week, 100 Years of Tempelhof Airport, Hebbel am Ufer, amongst others), have won the Mart Stam Prize or are currently nominated for the BBA. Her hybrid installations have traveled internationally to, amongst other places, Linz for Ars Electronica (Austria), Mexico for Bahidorá, Schauspielhaus Graz (Austria), to Kaserne Basel (Switzerland), as an Ars Electronica Export to Noise of Istanbul (Turkey) and will soon open a museum in Stockholm (Sweden). Her stage and VR video work have been presented at the IMPULSE Theater Festival, Flora in the Czech Republic (directed by Simone Dede Ayivi) and at the Berlin Performing Arts Festival (co-direction by Alisa Tretau). As a set designer, she has been represented twice within the scope of the Berlinale Panorama (directed by Henrika Kull) as well as worldwide at a variety of film festivals as well as in films that are shown within the regular programming of cinemas.

Jäckie Rydz (they/them, no pronouns) is a Polish-German director, author and set designer. Jäckie’s most recent production, BABYLON, premiered at Nowy Teatr in Warsaw in April of 2023 and had its German premiere in July of 2023 as part of the ancillary programing of the 2023 Theater der Welt festival. Jäckie completed a B. A. in set design at the Berlin University of the Arts and an M. A. in applied theater studies in Gießen. In addition, Jäckie has worked since 2019 as an independent performer and set designer in Europe, most recently in December 2023 at Mousonturm Frankfurt for the zaungäste collective and in June 2024 at Ringtheater Berlin for Elena Rose Light. Jäckie was a fellow of the EU-wide ChangeNow! program and the Academy of the German International Theater Institute. Over the course of artistic research, Jäckie questions heteronormative rituals using immersive set designs, poetic multilingual text and queer physicalities. Jäckie’s next work, 1* FC Ultra, about football as a queer ritual will receive its world premiere in March of 2025 at the studio of Nationaltheater Mannheim.

jackrydz.com