Willy Demeyer

Mayor of Liège (Belgium), Willy Demeyer, was elected President of Efus at the General Assembly on May 18, 2017. Graduating with a law degree in 1982, Willy Demeyer started his career as a lawyer at the Liege Bar.
In 1988 he became a councillor at the City of Liege and the head of the Socialist Group. Between 1991 and 1999 he was appointed as the alderman for Public Works before becoming the burgomaster. He went on to be elected to this position in 2000, 2006 and 2012.
In addition, he was a member of the Walloon Region Parliament from 2004 to 2005, Vice President of the Senate from 2009 to 2017 and a member of the Chamber of Representatives from 2014 to March 2017. Willy Demeyer is a member of the Commission investigating the attacks of March 2016 in Belgium. He is also Vice President of the International Association of Francophone Mayors since 1999.

Pascal Delcomminette

Virginie Cordier

Serge Rangoni

Serge Rangoni studied at the Conservatoire of Brussels. After working in various theatre institutions and at the Ministry of Culture, he was designated in 2004 as General Manager of Théâtre de Liège. Under his leadership, the theatre received the titles of “European center of theatrical creation and choreography” and “Centres for Drama” in the French-speaking area of Belgium, affirming its role in theatrical and dance productions and their dissemination to local and international audiences. Since his arrival at its head, the institution has developed considerably, with now an audience of 65,000 and more than 180 performances a season. Théâtre de Liège is today the leading stage in Wallonia.

Cláudia Belchior

Cláudia Belchior was the President of the Executive Board of the D. Maria II National Theatre in Lisbon, Portugal, a position she has held from July 2015 - June 2022. Cláudia has been involved with the performing arts for all of her career, at the foremost cultural institutions in Portugal, having served as Director, Coordinator for the Performing Arts, and Deputy Director for Planning and Budget at the Belém Cultural Centre and as Director of Production at the Gulbenkian Foundation. She is currently the executive general coordinator of Centro Cultural de Belém. She has taught courses in Production Management, Stage Management, and Technical Direction in several institutions.

Heidi Wiley

Heidi Wiley has been Executive Director of the European Theatre Convention (ETC) since 2009. Under her leadership, ETC has become an established European cultural network with an international programme of artistic collaboration, professional development and advocacy for Europe’s public theatres, spanning over 30 countries. She led ETC to become a strategic partner of the European Commission and the recipient of several prestigious prizes, including the 2022 Art Explora – Académie des Beaux-Arts European Award for innovation in access to culture; and European prizes for outstanding achievement in the fields of audience development and cultural heritage.

Heidi is a sought-after moderator and speaker at European events and conferences. In 2022, Speaker at the 8th Culture & RTBF Meeting; 2021, Consultant for European cultural policy agencies KEA (Brussels) and PPMI (Vilnius); 2020, Co-initiator of the 1st European Theatre Forum of the European Commission and the German EU Council Presidency; 2019, Author for the European Expert Network on Culture and Audiovisual (EENCA).

Heidi started her career as an international producer and touring manager for artists Victoria Chaplin and the Tiger Lillies, touring around Europe and Asia at major festivals and theatre venues. A studied cultural manager with degrees from La Sorbonne and Leuphana University, she lived and worked over the last 25 years in the UK, US, France and Germany.

Eric Arnal-Burtschy

Eric Arnal-Burtschy studied history, philosophy and geopolitics and obtained a master’s degree in European studies before moving on to the living and visual arts. His work, often focused on research on the physics of the Universe and a questioning of the human, is presented in many places in Europe and abroad. He has created with Lyllie Rouvière Bouncing Universe in a Bulk, diptych on the Universe and infinity, and Ciguë, a solo with Clara Furey on the relationship to freedom and solitude. His latest creation, Deep are the Woods, is an evocation of emptiness in the form of an immersive piece whose light is the performer. Eager to explore another form of relationship to the world and always interested in diplomatic and strategic issues, he is a parallel reserve officer in the French army and participated in Operation Barkhane in the Sahel. This experience led to the creation of his latest show, Why We Fight, a performance that sensitively and politically questions what can lead each of us to engage and why we fight. He received the prestigious Vocation Award from the Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet Foundation. Artist in residence at WorkSpaceBrussels Artist in residence at the Vanves Theatre.

Boeun Kim

Boeun Kim hails from South Korea and developed “A chair for co-responding” as a student at the programme in Digital Media at the HfK Bremen. The chair bundles the heat of a bottom sitting on it and transforms it into electrical energy through a thermoelectric generator. The power is transferred on to a lamp that irradiates plants and thereby provides them with energy to grow and perform photosynthesis. The oxygen resulting from this process is in turn benefitting the person on the chair: A perfect example of the inventive ways technology can be applied for positive effects in real life.

ERSATZ

The Ersatz company is composed of Camille Panza, director, Léonard Cornevin, lighting, digital and actor designer, Noam Rzewski, sound designer and Pierre Mercier, illustrator. Ersatz is a multidisciplinary collaborative project, active in the fields of live art and installation. Coming from theatre, plastic art, and illustration, their artistic approach is located at the crossroads of different media interconnected with each other, in a dialectic between illusion and reality.

Byungjun Kwon

Byungjun Kwon is a Korean electronic musician now based in The Netherlands. He is an important figure in South Korea’s underground music scene since the early 90s. While his interests range from choreography, sound typography and sound design for public spaces, Byungjun composes for theatre and dance as well as for traditional Korean instruments.
Byungjun Kwon started his musical career in early 90’s as a singer/songwriter and has released several albums ranging from alternative rock to minimal house. He creates music for records, sound tracks, fashion collections, contemporary dance, theatre plays and interdisciplinary events. Recent works and performances have been presented in many international venus. He lives and works in Amsterdam.

Anna Anderegg

Anna Anderegg is a Swiss performance artist. She studied dance in Bern, Montpellier, and Berlin. Her practice is built on the dialogue between the human body and its environment.
In 2013 she won the June Johnson Danceprice (Swiss dance awards) and the award Kultur- und Kreativpiloten Deutschland from the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. In 2016, she was the recipient of a six-month research fellowship in New York. In 2021 her piece Silver Boom received the Trudy Schlatter award and her work Alone Together won a nomination for the S+T+ARTS prize of the prestigious media art festival Ars Electronica.
Her work has been shown in various cities in Europe, Asia, and the US. In 2018, Anderegg created the commissioned work Fragmented for the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow designed by Rem Koolhaas. Between 2017 and 2019, Anderegg taught as a guest lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland Basel’s Institute of Aesthetic Practice and Theory.
In 2021 Anderegg was commissioned to design the Swiss Pavilion at the Gwangju Biennale (South Korea), for which occasion she produced the performance Alone Together and the short film by the same name. In September 2023 Anderegg will present her upcoming solo HopeMe during the Frieze artfair at the Song-Eun Museum, the first architecture built by Herzog & de Meuron in Korea.

Dead Centre

Dead Centre is a theatre company based in Dublin. So far, they have created work that has premiered in Dublin, Vienna, Berlin, and Gothenburg. Their shows have toured around the world, including the USA, Hong Kong, China, Australia, France, Estonia, Holland, Romania, Italy, and throughout the UK.
They are indebted to a close team of collaborators who work with them on an ongoing basis—writers, technicians, inventors, designers, and performers. They are able to create work thanks to the support of the Arts Council Ireland, Culture Ireland, and Arts Council England. Other organisations that have supported them along the way include Dublin Fringe, Dublin Theatre Festival, Project Arts Centre, the Gate Theatre, Abbey Theatre, the James Joyce Centre, the National Theatre Studio, Battersea Arts Centre, Irish Arts Center, Mayfest, Warwick Arts Centre, Pavilion Theatre, Science Gallery Dublin, The Mac Belfast, and Dublin City Council.
Dead Centre was founded in 2012 by Ben Kidd, Bush Moukarzel, and Adam Welsh.

Guillaume Marmin

Trained at the University of Lyon II and ARFIS Guillaume Marmin is a French visual artist. His work, connected from the beginning to the music scene and performing arts, is part of a revival of the visual creation by overcoming traditional forms of storytelling and traditional performing media. Influenced by experimental filmmakers such as Len Lye or Stan Brakhage, Guillaume Marmin is looking for a new synaesthetic alphabet, a common language between images and sounds, rhythms, contrast and sleek moving figures.

Ontroerend Goed

Ontroerend Goed is a Belgian, Ghent-based theatre performance group with international renown. The group is made of young creators who explore the space between theatre and performance, writing their own texts from a strong basic concept and adapting familiar formats from various media. From sensorial experiences with blindfolded, individual audience members, over anarchistic teenage performances up to shows that profoundly explore what it means to be a theatre-goer, the group continues to create work that is equally challenging and treacherously shallow.

Igor Cardellini & Tomas Gonzales

K7 Productions is a Swiss artistic organisation that produces stage performances by Tomas Gonzalez and Igor Cardellini and projects by the collective BALESTRA | CARDELLINI | GONZALEZ. Before L’âge d’or, the artists presented Je m’appelle Tomas Gonzalez et nous avons 60 min., Blockbuster, O.V.N.I., Self-help and Showroom.

Tomas Gonzalez studied literature at the University of Lausanne and theatre at Manufacture-HEARTS, where he has taught since 2017. Along with Anne Pellois, he provides a sensitive history of acting. His research focuses on copying, imitation and reactivation processes. He also works with Jérôme Bel, Milo Rau, Yan Duyvendak, Stefan Kaegi, Mohammad Al Attar, Sara Leghissa and Emilie Charriot as an actor or artistic collaborator.

Igor Cardellini studied anthropology, sociology and political science at the University of Lausanne. He worked on the dramaturgy of King Kong Théorie, Ivanov and Passion Simple by Emilie Charriot, adaptations in which he focused on the relationships between gender, sex and class. He is more broadly interested in power relationships and the way in which theatrical situations allow us to reactivate them and put them in play. He also writes for several Swiss daily newspapers and is member of the Belluard Bollwerk Festival committee.

Yves Degryse

Yves Degryse (Oudenaarde,°1977) received his training as an actor at Toneelschool Dora van der Groen (Royal Flemish Conservatory of Antwerp) where he graduated in 2000.
As an actor, he appeared in productions by NTGent, SkaGeN (co-founder) and Comp. Marius. In 2003, Degryse co-founded the theatre company BERLIN. From the beginning, the company started from a documentary and interdisciplinary character and is considered a pioneer in international documentary theatre. The basis of its creations included Jerusalem, the North Pole, Bonanza and Chernobyl.
BERLIN had its international breakthrough in 2006 with the show Bonanza. Over the past 20 years, the company toured worldwide with 13 creations in 28 countries. In 2013, BERLIN received the Total Theatre Award at the Edinburgh Festival and in 2016 the Flemish Culture Prize (the Ultimas). Four performances were selected for the Theatre Festival: Bonanza, Land's End, True Copy and in 2023 The making of Berlin. Degryse has in recent years appeared in films by Felix Van Groeningen, and tv-series like Callboys and Chantal.
With BERLIN as the new house artist, Degryse will produce new work at NTGent in the coming years. At the moment, our private lives  is already planned for 2025.

Blanca Li

Blanca Li is a choreographer, a film director, a dancer and an actress. Whether in performance, opera, video clip or feature film, she initiates and realises a great number of projects: not restricted to one style, she works in a broad spectrum of physical forms of expression, from flamenco to classical ballet to hip-hop. With Blanca Li everything begins and ends in the energy of movement and dance.
Born in Granada, Spain, she studied in New York with Martha Graham before setting up her own dance company in Paris, where she has created eleven choreographic pieces since 1993. The Opéra de Paris commissioned her to create Les Indes Galantes and the ballet Shéhérazade. She was director of the BerlinBallett at the Komische Oper from 2001 to 2002.
Familiar with the cinema as a choreographer, she wrote and directed her first feature film, Le Défi, as a tribute to American musical comedies translated to the world of French hip-hop and inspired by her 2002 show, Macadam Macadam.

Marcus Lobbes

As director of the Dortmund Academy, he is in demand locally, nationally and internationally for lecture and discourse formats; an important concern for him is the formation and promotion of various networks for the performing arts as well as the communication of artistic research in correspondence with the latest technologies to theatre and educational institutions, politics and the public.
Since 1995 he has worked as a director, set designer and author in musical and spoken theatre and since 2014 he has also been regularly invited as a guest lecturer at various renowned colleges and universities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Martin Hennecke

Martin Hennecke (*1987) is a percussionist, composer and, since 2009, deputy principal timpanist of the Saarland State Orchestra Saarbrücken.

As a timpanist and percussionist, he has performed with around one fifth of the 129 German theatre, concert and radio orchestras, from B for the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra to W for the WDR Symphony Orchestra. In addition, he has been a volunteer for many years as an orchestra board member and has been a member of various committees of the German Music and Orchestra Association UNISONO (including the TVK Commission) since 2015. Here he is actively involved in shaping various aspects of a modern professional orchestra, such as optimizing the selection process ("audition"). His compositional work focuses on drums and electronics, but also AI as a means of artistic expression, as well as orchestral music and the performative embedding of visual elements within the concert. His works have been premiered at the EVIMUS Festival for electroacoustic and visual music, productions of the Saarland State Ballet, in the Philharmonie Luxembourg and the Zappanale Festival, among others, and have been broadcast by various ARD radio stations and included in the Contemporary Music Score Collection of the UCLA Music Library.
The focus of his artistic research is music and AI. He is a fellow of the Helmholtz Information and Data Science Academy and the Academy for Theater and Digitality Dortmund and is working on the question of how to design and implement an orchestral live remix using artificial intelligence based on humanoid data from the audience and performers. The technology and concepts developed have already been used in several productions by the Saarland State Orchestra.
He was awarded a scholarship at the German Music Competition in 2013. In 2023 he was nominated for the German theatre prize DER FAUST for the innovative concert performance “The (Un)Answered Question – a Data Science Powered Music Experiment”.

Carla Meller

Carla Meller has held various positions at the Residenztheater in Munich for ten seasons, including as a dispatcher in the artistic operations office. At the same time, she gained valuable experience as a junior consultant in advising cultural companies. Her academic background includes studies in political, economic and social sciences at the universities Sciences Po Paris and McGill University in Canada, as well as a master's degree in cultural management. In 2021, she completed the part-time training course in theatre and music management at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Since the beginning of 2023, Carla Meller has been part of the team at the Academy for Theater and Digitality, where she is responsible for establishing a wide variety of collaborations. In this role, she brings her extensive experience in cultural management to network the academy in the global theatre landscape and promote innovative, future-oriented projects.

Michael Eickhoff

Michael Eickhoff studied history, German and sociology in Bielefeld and Paris. Since 2000 he has worked as a production manager, dramaturge, curator and lecturer for various theaters (Bonn, Wiesbaden and Bielefeld theaters) and universities. From 2010 to 2020 he was part of the artistic management team at the Schauspiel Dortmund under the direction of Kay Voges as (chief) dramaturge. Here he has accompanied a large number of productions, curated discourse series, festivals and international guest performances, and helped to conceptually set up the Academy for Theater and Digitality.
He is particularly interested in a theatre in discourse with diverse social actors – in exchange with political-artistic activism, journalism and with a variety of related art disciplines.
Since summer 2020 he has been part of the Academy for Theatre and Digitality, where he is responsible, among other things, for (international) networking and cooperation between art, science and business.

Annabell Blank

Annabell is a project manager with extensive experience across a variety of sectors in the arts. Passionate about holistic approaches to international cultural collaboration, she has worked with institutions like the English National Opera, the Grimme-Institute, the artist agency Impresariat Simmenauer, and the University of Cologne New York Office. She has devised academic conferences and co-authored essays on digital sovereignty, media aesthetics and the public sphere at the University of Cologne, from which she holds a Master’s in Media and Culture Studies.

Kyu Choi

Kyu is a festival director, producer and researcher, currently working as artistic director of Seoul Performing Arts Festival (SPAF) from 2022-26 and has worked as creative director at Performing Arts Market in Seoul (PAMS). With a focus on the important themes of contemporary art, such as ‘New narratives', ‘Technology & Science Innovation and Post-humanism in arts’, and ‘Locality and Translocality’, Kyu has developed numerous projects, including creative research residencies, labs and workshops. His previous positions include: festival director and creative director for - UK/Korea Season Festival 2017-18; Chuncheon International Mime Festival; Ansan Street Arts Festival. In 2005 he founded AsiaNow productions, in which for over 10 years he worked for Korean theaters in the field of international exchange, while also developing various international co-productions and residency projects as a producer, and dramaturge. Since 2013, he has been working for the Asian Producers’ Platform and APP Camp, a collaborative network of Asian producers for the development of various projects.

Cho-pei Kao

Sasapin Sirriwanij

Sasapin Siriwanij is a Bangkok-based theater artist and producer. She is a core member of B-Floor Theatre, co-founder of For What Theater, and Artistic Director of Bangkok International Performing Arts Meeting (BIPAM). She has been continuously performing in physical theater productions both in Thailand and abroad while creating her own work, such as the solo performance Oh! Ode (Oh! What Joy, What Goodness, What Beauty Calls For Ode No.7012).

Yoko Kawasaki

Born in 1982 in Mie. After graduating from the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in German in 2006, she studied at The Free University of Berlin. She then worked at CAN Inc. and as an Art Coordinator for Kyoto Art Center from 2011-2014. From 2014 to 2015 she was a fellow for the Program of Overseas Study by the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan and studied at HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin. In recent years she has produced for Yasuko Yokoshi, Kaori Seki Co. PUNCTUMUN, as well as been production coordinator for Okazaki Art Theatre and Uthis Haemamool x Toshiki Okada x Yuya Tsukahara’s Pratthana – A Portrait of Possession produced by the company precog. Also involved in the production coordination of the TPAM Direction Program. In 2018, she co-curated The Instrument Builders Project Kyoto – Circulating Echo. She has been involved as production coordinator at Kyoto Experiment since 2011 and managed many international projects.

Jerôme Villeneuve

Jérôme Villeneuve is the director of Hexagone and president of the association Arcan (Resource association for digital artistic creation), which organises several events around the arts, science and digital technology, such as Negotium or DN[A]. Holder of a doctorate in "Engineering of Cognition, Interaction, Learning and Creation", he is also a researcher within the "Digital Arts and Sensory Immersions" unit, built with the Ministry of Culture, the CNRS, the University of Grenoble Alpes and installed at the GIPSA laboratory. Jérôme Villeneuve's profile, very oriented towards art and science, was logically chosen for France, where a significant part of the programming is focused on this duality: the theatre organizes in particular the biennial Experimenta, and works in close collaboration with the CEA.

Natacha Duviquet

After studying art history and performing arts, Natacha Duviquet discovered experimental cinema alongside visual artists Katerina Thomadaki and Maria Klonaris. She continued her work with images, dedicating several years to the distribution and production of documentaries. At the same time, she pursued training in multimedia journalism. She joined Orange as head of media portal animation, then moved to the mobile teams to lead the new concepts division of the multimedia marketing department. Between 2005 and 2012, she was responsible for Orange France's institutional communications, focusing on sustainability issues, institutional and cultural partnerships, and she conceived and directed the site culturemobile.net. She is currently the director of Siana.

Jonathan Thonon

Jonathan Thonon worked for 10 years as a researcher in the Department of Arts and Communication Sciences (ULiège) and CRECI (Paris III) before joining the Théâtre de Liège in 2014. He is now responsible for European projects and innovation. In this capacity, he is notably the coordinator of IMPACT (International Meeting in Performing Arts & Creative Technologies), a transdisciplinary, transsectoral and cross-border project whose objective is to build bridges between the arts, sciences and technologies.

Jérémie Bellot

Architect and artist, founder of the AV Extended studio and the “Château de Beaugency” digital arts centre, Jérémie Bellot is interested in light, space and the challenges of the digital world. The intent is to improve or reveal the relationship between architecture and mankind through transmedia art. Bellot places architectural metamorphosis through pixels, light, and sound at the core of his artistic concept.

Marina Maleni

Marina Maleni has worked successfully as an actress, TV host and radio music producer for several years before 2001, when she started her work as Theatre Development Officer for Cyprus Theatre Organisation.  In charge of State theatre subsidies and policy forming for two decades, European collaborations, playwriting development, non-professional theatre, theatre education programmes, festivals, and the Curator for PQ National Participation of Cyprus since 2007 (Golden Triga 2023).  Additionally, Marina hosted a prominent CYBC TV talk show focused on culture for six years.

Marina Maleni has worked extensively in the Committee for Theatre in Schools (THOC - Ministry of Education and Culture, is a member of the advisory body of the Cyprus Youth Board, a Board member of the Cyprus Theatre Museum, is an honorary member of the Board of CYCSTAT and ASSITEJ Cyprus and is a member of the Advisory Board of World Stage Design. She has coordinated several very successful European culture program collaborations for Cyprus. She has been a Member of the Board of the European Theatre Convention since November 2023.

Georg Häusler

Georg Häusler is currently the Director for Culture, Creativity and Sport in the European Commission (DG EAC). Prior to that, he was Director in another Commission department for seven years.
He joined the Commission in 1999 and has had several senior posts including as Head of Cabinet of Commissioner Dacian Ciolos, from 2009 to 2014.
Before he began his Commission career, he was Secretary General of an EU-wide NGO. He studied law (PhD in 1993).

Gabrielle Bernoville

Gabrielle Bernoville currently works at the European Commission where her portfolio covers cultural heritage, European identity, remembrance policy, European theatre and the arts. She also works for Creative Europe, a funding scheme programme supporting and empowering creative sectors. Gabrielle holds a degree in political science from Sciences Po and the College of Europe with a focus on Eastern Partnership countries. Beyond that, her interests cover European democracy and citizenship.

Elena Polivtseva

Elena is an independent researcher and a co-founder of Culture Policy Room, a European think-tank on cultural policy. She worked as a Senior Researcher at IFACCA (International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies) and a Head of Policy and Research at IETM (International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts). Elena authored several publications on cultural policies and funding strategies, and artists’ working conditions. She was one of the co-initiators and a project manager of Perform Europe, a Board member at Culture Action Europe, and a Consultant at UNESCO. Believing in the power of knowledge-driven advocacy, she is dedicated to ensuring that insights from the cultural field inform and shape effective policies.

Miriam Kičiňová

Miriam Kičiňová was born in Trebišov. She studied theatre dramaturgy and theory and criticism of theatre art at the Academy of Arts in Bratislava, where she also completed doctoral studies. As part of the Erasmus program, she participated in an exchange study stay at AGRFT in Ljubljana. As a juror or correspondent for the festival diaries, she participated in tours of non-professional theatre such as Scenic harvest. As a reviewer, she wrote for the magazines Javisko, KOD, Divadlo v medzičase and Monitoring Slovak Theatres. She worked as a teacher at the Church Conservatory in Bratislava and at the Conservatory in Košice. She is an external teacher at the Academy of Performing Arts, at the Department of Scenography and Costume Design. In the years 2015-2019, she worked as an external dramaturg of the Košice State Theater. She also collaborated with the Jonáš Záborský Theater in Prešov, the Andrej Bagar Theater in Nitra, and the Ján Palárik Theater in Trnava.
In Činohra of the Slovak National Theater, she has been working as a dramaturgy lecturer since 2010, as a dramaturg since 2020, and has also been involved in educational projects and foreign activities.

Fariba Mosleh

Fariba Mosleh is a cultural manager and curator with extensive experience in the art world. She holds degrees in Cultural Anthropology, Sinology, and Cultural Management from universities in Vienna, Guangzhou, and Barcelona. Her work in the arts has taken her to various cities around the world, including Vienna, New York City, Taipei, and Brussels.
She specializes in project management, production, and curation of transcultural, cross-genre, collaborative, and anti-discriminatory artistic practices, with a particular focus on performative and visual arts. In addition to her institutional curatorial activities, she founded and leads studioOne - an association for art and culture projects. Mosleh is also a member of juries and advisory boards in the art sector.
Currently, Fariba Mosleh is working as a curator for transdisciplinary arts, as well as a creative europe project at Brunnenpassage Vienna. In 2024, among other things, she has been programming the Open Water Dialogues for European Capital of Culture Bad Ischl Salzkammergut. Wiener Festwochen invited her to become expert member of the Council of the Republic Vienna.
Her expertise lies in promoting diversity and addressing the needs of plural societies through the arts.

Elfriede Jelinek

Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian playwright and novelist. She is one of the most decorated authors to write in German and was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature for her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power". She is considered to be among the most important living playwrights of the German language.

Kay Voges

Kay Voges describes his work at the intersection of theatre, stage and digital media, and names the institutional boundaries for this necessary work in the current theatre system. Kay Voges is a German acting and opera director, since the 2010/2011 season director of Schauspiel Dortmund and since 2017 founding director of the Academy for Theatre and Digitality.

Anita Debaere

Anita Debaere holds the position of Director at Pearle*- Live Performance Europe. She is an expert in cultural cross-border mobility questions, European policy, and regulatory affairs and social policies.
Before joining Pearle* her career was in the classical music sector, with an intermission period where she worked in the external relations department of an energy company, including responsibilities on public affairs, sponsorship and patronage. Committed to creating a sustainable environment for the live performance, she seeks to put specific concerns and issues forward which may impact the daily operations of a performing arts organisation. International touring and international relations are the threads running through her career.

Audrey Jungers

Audrey Jungers joined Opera Europa in 2003, where she grew the network to 237 members in 46 countries and broadened the scope of services offered, including biannual conferences, specialist forums and online tools. Further initiatives include the Opera Management Course, World Opera Day, and Operabook. Since 2015, thanks to the support of the European Union's Creative Europe programme, Opera Europa has managed OperaVision, a freeview streaming platform for opera and ballet. 
Audrey confirmed her love for the performing arts while devoting her free time as a teenager to creating the European young opera friends group Juvenilia, supported by Gerard Mortier, in parallel to her Executive Masters in Marketing and Advertising from Solvay Business School and professional theatre dance course at London Studio Centre.
She went on to join the communications department of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels under Bernard Foccroulle, first as assistant to the press officer, then as young audiences’ manager. She was also in charge of co-productions, rentals and sales for La Monnaie for three seasons under Peter de Caluwe.
Audrey currently runs the Brussels office of Opera Europa, with a team of seven.

Jean Peters

Jean Peters is a senior reporter at Correctiv, where he develops new forms of investigative research and creative forms of journalism. He previously worked as an author for Jan Böhmerman's ZDF Magazin Royale, and S. Fischer is his publishing house. His most well-known research is probably the "Secret Plan Against Germany," which he led as editor-in-chief and co-wrote the play.

Herman Paassen

Herman is a senior lecturer in interactive media at Saxion University of Applied Sciences in Enschede, the Netherlands. He graduated from the Minerva Art Academy in Groningen, specializing in graphic design, illustration, and computer animation. Initially, he worked as a 3D designer and animator for film and television productions, and he has extensive experience in interactive media as an interaction and graphical user interface designer. He later transitioned to teaching Creative Media & Game Technologies at Saxion.
Herman believes that a designer's primary responsibility is to make complex information and technology accessible and user-friendly. He emphasizes that understanding the needs of different target audiences is integral to the design process, adhering to the principle that form follows function.

Hester van der Ent

Hester van der Ent waborn September 24, 1961 in The Hague. She holds a Bachelor degree of applied science (business school) and a Master´s degree of Business Administration. She is currently professor at Saxion University of Applied Sciences, she teaches the courses of Creative Media and Game Technologies and she is a co-coordinator of the XR Lab of Saxion Academy of Creative Technology. Her field of expertise is Desing Thinking, Consumer Behaviour, Marketing, Advertising, Content Development. She was also guest teacher at the Universities of Applied Sciences in Finland (Oulu University of Applied Sciences), Stuttgart (Hochschule der Medien) and China (Jiaotong University Beijing). Furthermore, she participated in the Human Rights Diplohack 2016 in Geneva and she was the representative of Saxion at the United Nations Geneva Office and the World Health Organisation in Geneva.

Pål Mørk Hansen

Pål Mørk Hansen, Physicist, serial company founder, and today Head of Innovation and System Development at NetNordic Norway. After 20 years working with developing software solutions he co-founded an AI Team and worked closely with delivering Machine Learning projects to innovative customers in Norway. During his time in NetNordic he has devoted much of his time to innovation and a key area of interest has been in looking at new ways to deliver next generation customer experience solutions within eHealth, Industry, contact centre and customer engagement deliverables.

Florence Minder

Florence Minder is a 42-year-old actress, author, director and mother. She is co-director of the Venedig Meer company.
She believes that the imaginative capacities of living beings and the weaving of relationships between them are the most precious energy resources of the future.
Fiction is her field of choice. Her life experiences keep her lucid. Laughter is one of her lifelines.

Julien Jaillot

Julien Jaillot has been working with stage creators for 20 years as a creative assistant and/or acting director.
He is co-director of the company Venedig Meer and co-signs the stage direction of L'invisible n'est pas inexistant.
He is an advocate of very ‘healthy’ acting, which aims to celebrate the specificities of each performer and makes language resonate in its meanings and theatricality.
He defends theatre as a human meeting place deeply rooted in the present of the performance.
He believes in the powers of fiction.

George Albert Costea

George Albert Costea is a Romanian film and theatre actor.He was born on May 14, 1984 in Bucuresti, Romania. He graduated from National University of Theatrical Arts and Cinematography in 2008.In 2009, he plays first role in the movie Nunta lui Oli. Other notable roles in Breaking News (2017), Outrageously Disco (2010) and Nunta lui Oli (2009).

Catinca Drăgănescu

Catinca Drăgănescu (b. 1984) is a Romanian theatre director, playwright, and researcher with an international activity. Her studies include training in advertising and PR, as well as a BA and a MA in theatre directing (2012) and a PhD in theatre studies (2019). Since 2020 she works as a researcher at the National University of Theatre Arts and Cinematography in Bucharest, focusing on social design, innovation for social change, degrowth and applied research.

Paulien Geerlings

Paulien Geerlings (Amsterdam,1970) is a Dutch theatre-maker with an Indo-European background and boardmember of the European Theatre Convention (ETC). After her high school education, she studied Philosophy and Theatre studies at the University of Amsterdam, gaining her MSc in 1997. In 2004 she received her MA at DasArts (currently DAS Theatre), a master’s programme for artistic practices in the field of theatre at the Amsterdam University of the Arts. Since her graduation in 1997 she has been working as a freelance dramaturge with several theatre directors, including Ola Mafaalani, the South-African based Bratt Bailey and Marcus Azzini. For the last fourteen years, she has been head of dramaturgy and international collaborations at De Toneelmakerij, the Amsterdam theatre company for young audiences. Both at De Toneelmakerij and at ETC, her key focus is on diversity policies and gender equality. Next to this, she translated several plays, wrote theatre adaptations, taught at the Amsterdam University of the Arts and was a founding board member of Assitej NL. As a dramaturge, she has a strong focus on the development of new repertoire and the coaching of playwrights.

Vanessa Hannesschläger

Vanessa Hannesschläger is head of European Collaboration of Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. She holds a PhD in literature from the University of Vienna, where she teaches digital humanities. Her research focuses on new narratives and forms in theatre, a topic she explores in her work at Ars Electronica in projects around digital theatre and new approaches to XR. In the European policy context, Vanessa advocates for digital infrastructure for the arts and humanities, data literacy and Open Science.

Taavet Jansen

Taavet Jansen is an Estonian digital artist, choreographer, and researcher, whose work focuses on the intersection of performing arts and technology. With a background in choreography and new media from the AHK Amsterdam Theatre School, Taavet has dedicated his career to exploring and developing digital platforms for art events, with a particular interest in creating hybrid performances that merge physical and virtual spaces. He is a lecturer in multimedia at the University of Tartu Viljandi Culture Academy and regularly contributes to various research projects that investigate the role of technology in the arts. As a coordinator and researcher for the collective e⁻lektron, Taavet has been instrumental in advancing digitally mediated art experiences, pushing the boundaries of how audiences interact with and experience performance.

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