ANDREI ZAVADSKI
author, researcher

Dr. Andrei Zavadski is an author and scholar working at intersections of memory studies, museum studies, public history, and media studies, with a focus on Eastern Europe. He is a research associate at the Institute of Art and Material Culture, TU Dortmund University, a co-founding editor of The February Journal, and an associate member of the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He has written on Gulag memory, the remembrance of the 1990s in Russia, the 2020 protests in Belarus, Germany’s changing memoryscape, museum participation as labor, and other topics.

ANASTASIA PATLAY
director, playwright, curator

Anastasia Patlay is a director, playwright, educator and festival curator specialising in documentary theatre. Her productions were featured at the Teatr.doc, Meyerhold Center, Sakharov Center and Shchusev Museum of Architecture (all in Moscow) as well as at the Novosibirsk Globus Theatre. She served as the curator of the “Archaeology of Memory” theatre programme at the Sakharov Center and was a curator of the “Hunting for Reality” festival at the Teatr.doc. For a year, between February 2023 and February 2024, Patlay was a resident of the Artists at Risk programme at the Brecht House Museum in Augsburg, where she prepared a local version of her latest production called Memoria, a play dedicated to the work of the Russian organisation Memorial and the death of the German actress Carola Neher in the Gulag, one of the cases that Memorial had investigated. The production premiered at the Brechtfestival in Augsburg in February 2024 and has recently been shown at the Münchner Kammerspiele. In 2024, Patlay and colleagues held the Echo of Lubimovka festival in Munich and Warsaw. In September 2024, Anastasia was announced as one of the art directors of the independent Russian-speaking playwriting festival Liubimovka (in exile). Since February 2022, she has been living in Spain.

DANTE BUU
performance artist

Dante is a performance artist from Montenegro, living and working between Rožaje and Berlin. His practice is of love, disobedience, intimacy and freedom, and how these are affected and altered through the past, present and the future. Using his body and its emotional and physical transformations as the main medium, Buu’s extensive durational performances take the form of sculptures, installations, drawings, photography, prose poetry and hand-embroidery. In Dante Buu’s works the bodily act of creation, as a form of continued action, breaks the artistic and societal norms such as: private vs. public, being good vs. being bad and breathing vs. suffocating. Buu represented Montenegro at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, and his works have been shown at numerous international exhibitions and festivals, including: Bangkok Art Biennial (2024); Exercises in a Collection (+MSUM, 2023); No Intermission (Marina Abramović Institute, Royal Theatre Carré, 2022); Young & Restful (MeetFactory, 2022); “thigh high” (Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2021); NEXUS 1 (TBA Festival, PICA, 2019).

MARFA GORVITS
director

Marfa Gorvits is a distinguished director, actress, and two-time Golden Mask Award laureate. She began her education at the Moscow International Film School and went on to study at the Shchepkin Higher Theater School under the guidance of Yury and Olga Solomin. Later, she completed her studies at the Directing Faculty of the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts (RATI-GITIS) under the mentorship of Sergey Zhenovach. As an actress, Marfa performed in productions with the Theatre Art Studio and subsequently ventured into directing, with notable works such as The Fearless Nobleman at RAMT, Cinderella, and Flying Swings at the Praktika Theater.

In addition to her work in mainstream theater, Marfa founded the Children’s Documentary Theater Laboratory (DDTL) and serves as its artistic director. Her achievements include awards from the Arlekin All-Russian Children’s Theater Festival in St. Petersburg and the Tsar’s Fairy Tale International Theater Festival in Veliky Novgorod. Her directorial career has taken her to Estonia, Norway, Germany, and Israel, and she has collaborated with theaters across Russia, from St. Petersburg to Sakhalin.