Boris Nikitin
 
Boris Nikitin, born in Basel and the son of Ukrainian-Slovakian-French-Jewish immigrants, is a theatre director and author.  He is considered one of the most important theatre makers in con-temporary German-language theatre. For over thirteen years, his productions, texts and happenings have been dealing with the representation and production of identity and reality. They are border crossings between illusion theatre and performance, between documentary and propaganda. Nikitin's works are raw, frontal, yet always precisely composed and always searching for the boundaries and breaking points of the aesthetic.
 
"Like few others, Boris Nikitin is currently leading theatre to a critical point," writes the German professional journal Theater heute.
 
In his last plays and texts, Nikitin increasingly deals with the relationship between art and illness.  In 2017, Nikitin was awarded the J.M.R. Lenz Drama Prize of the city of Jena for his complete works.  In 2020 he received the Swiss Theatre Prize. His play  Attempt on Dying was invited to the Swiss Theatertreffen in 2021. His play First Season. 20 Jahre Big Brother was invited to the Mülheim Theatre Days in 2021 as one of the best German-language plays.
 
Boris Nikitin was the holder of the Christoph-Schlingensief Visiting Professorship at the University of Bochum in 2018/2019.

Marios Chatziprokopiou
 
Marios Chatziprokopiou is a performance studies scholar interested in performances of migration and refugeeness, performances of gender and sexuality, ritual performances of lament, contemporary re-readings of ancient drama, as well as in the intersections between ethnography, narrative, and performance. Ηe also works as a writer, translator, and dramaturge.
 
Having studied history and theatre in Thessaloniki and visual Arts (video and performance) in Paris, he earned an MA in social anthropology (École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales de Paris), and a PhD in theatre and performance studies (Aberystwyth University). He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Centre for the Humanities in Greece, and he is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology, and an adjunct lecturer at the department of Culture and Creative Media and Industries at the University of Thessaly.
 
He has taught courses on anthropology, theatre and performance in several institutions (University of Patras, Panteion University, Aberystwyth University, Federal University of Bahia). His articles appear in international edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals. He has presented performances and lecture performances in Greece and abroad, and he has collaborated as a dramaturge with the 'Geopoetics' group in different projects. He translated three books by Clarice Lispector into Modern Greek. His poetry has been translated into English and French, and his first book Local Tropics (Antipodes, 2019) is currently shortlisted for the Yannis Varveris prize of the Hellenic Authors' Society.