Václav Janoščík is theorist, professor and curator, focusing on pop-philosophy, vernacular (popular) ontologies, speculative history, democratization of contemporary art or thinking, political ecology (of affects), philosophy of technics and media, and gaming. He works at the Faculty of Art and Design of UJEP, UMPRUM Prague, The New Centre, and the University of New Haven. In his pedagogical, curatorial, philosophical, and artistic practice, he connects contemporary philosophy, visual art, and popular culture. One of his aims is to bridge the critical legacy of art and philosophy with broader culture and topical issues of today such as identity politics, technology or affective ecologies.
Šimon Peták is a Theatre Dramaturg, Educator at Janacek Academy of Performing Arts in Brno, Scriptwriter, and Poet. Currently, he‘s in the process of finishing doctoral studies at his alma mater. His research focuses on models of teaching theatre dramaturgy at universities in Europe.
Paulína Petáková is a Theatre Educator and Theatre Director. She graduated from JAMU with a MA degree in Theatre Pedagogy and continues her doctoral studies there. Her pedagogical experience covers age groups from preschool to adults, state schools and elementary art schools. In her artistic work, she most often focuses on theatre for children.
Daniel Echeverri, PhD is a Graphic Designer and Assistant Professor at Masaryk University specialising in interaction design and emerging technologies. With teaching and professional experience in America, Asia, and Europe, his research explores digital and tangible interactive narratives and experiences.
Zoë Svendsen (zoë/her) director, dramaturg, writer, researcher making participatory theatre performances and installations exploring ecological crisis and capitalism, including: Ness, a digital/sonic immersive landscape performance adapted from the poem by Robert Macfarlane (HighTide/Metal Culture); Wild Dress by Kate Fletcher (Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking); Love Letters to a Liveable Future (Cambridge Junction); video installation Factory of the Future (Oslo Architecture Triennale); Artsadmin Green Commission, WE KNOW NOT WHAT WE MAY BE (Barbican); Tipping Point commission, 3rd Ring Out. Zoë is Associate Artist at Cambridge Junction and lectures on dramaturgy and performance at the University of Cambridge, undertaking practice-led research. Through Artistic Associateships with HighTide and the Donmar Warehouse, Zoë developed the concept/ethos of climate dramaturgy, running workshops nationally/internationally. Zoë is a founding member of the pan-European network, the Naked Theatre.
Roman Senkl is a Berlin and Vienna-based theatre director/writer with a focus on digital and hybrid theater since 2008. His pioneering works include stage and multimedia productions, mixed reality performances (AR, VR - including the world's largest VR environment in Mozilla Hubs with Ars Electronica), holographic projections, as well as apps for interactive storytelling and artificial intelligence. Roman was co-founder of the Academy for Theater and Digitality in Dortmund, Head of the Digital Arts Laboratory at the Berliner Festspiele / Theatertreffen, as well as Head of the Department of Digital Art at Theater Dortmund. He is a founding member of the Naked Theatre, a pan-European theatre network initiated by Belgian theatre director, Luk Perceval. His production of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris will premiere at Burgtheater Wien, in June.
In 2020, Hannah Baumann, Johannes Worms, and Franziska Hiller founded the collective Godot Komplex. In the midst of the pandemic, it became their creative incubator.
Godot Komplex combines musical and conceptual expertise from the field of classical music. The collective designs aesthetically mediating music events and sees itself as a think tank for new stage formats and participatory spaces of experience.
The collective has received several awards and has realized projects for, among others, the German Federal Cultural Foundation, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy University of Music and Theater Leipzig, TONALi (Germany), and the Hidalgo Festival (Germany).
At this year's Theatre Conference JAMU, Godot Komplex will provide insight into the conception and implementation of “Let's plays: connection loading” and talk about collective decision-making processes, hybrid dramaturgy, and the intertwining of physical and digital stage space.
Maria Luigia Gioffrè (*1990) is an artist and PhD candidate (2024-2027) at Accademia Accademia Nazionale d’Arte Drammatica Silvio d’Amico in Rome, Italy, with a fellowship co-founded by Accademia Albertina Belle Arti di Torino and Teatro Stabile di Torino - National Theatre. She holds an MA in “Contemporary Photography: Practices and Philosophies” at Central Saint Martins, University of Arts London, where she graduated in 2017 with a thesis entitled “Selfie: the uncanny glitch of the other self”. Between 2025 and 2026 she is visiting PhD at Royal Conservatoire Antwerp and at Angewandte, Vienna. Her research questions anthropologies and technologies of self-exposure within intimate and commercial arenas (i.e. social media) and how they inform expanded definitions of theatricality, live art practices, cultures of affects. Her work and research has been presented in independent and institutional programs, included: Henry Moore Foundation (2026); Museo Nazionale della Scienza e Tecnologia (2025); Contested Desires - Creative Europe (2024-2026); Primavera dei Teatri (2024); Biennale di Venezia - Biennale Teatro, Theatre Direction u35 (2023); Santarcangelo dei Teatri - KRAKK (2022). She is founder and performance curator of the art residency platform In-ruins.
Guy Dolev is an artist, researcher, and teacher working in performance, video, and text. Based in West Jerusalem, his practice employs critical choreographic inquiry into the city's history and politics, navigating the violent logics of Israel/Palestine to imagine cracks for escape from within: transcendence through immersion.
A graduate of the danceWEB scholarship programme at the ImPulsTanz Festival in Vienna, Guy holds an M.A. in Cultural Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a B.A. in History and Humanities from Tel Aviv University. He teaches in the interdisciplinary arts programme at the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts and physical theatre at the community centre in Umm al-Khair.
Firdoze Bulbulia is an internationally acclaimed film producer, director, and educator working across film, documentary, animation, and theatre. She holds an MA in African Studies from Ohio University (USA), a BA Honours in Dramatic Arts from WITS University (South Africa), and a Licentiate in Drama from Trinity College (UK); she is currently pursuing a PhD in Art, Design, and Architecture. Her filmography is extensive and genre-diverse, comprising six feature films and numerous documentaries, including Mandela’s Africa, dedicated to the legacy of Nelson Mandela, and the feature-length documentary A Song for Refugees, which was presented in the Pavilion Afriques section at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023. She has held major international leadership roles in the field of children’s and youth film, including serving as President of CIFEJ and as Festival Director of The Nelson Mandela Children’s Film Festival. Her work consistently integrates film practice with Pan-African perspectives and strong social engagement.
Bello Benischauer
Interdisciplinary Australian artist with Austrian roots, artistic director, sound composer and performer. He creates works ranging from video poetry, audio-visual installations, public interventions, performance lectures, sound compositions to innovative theatre productions that deliver impactful socio-cultural commentary with a surreal touch. He develops projects on both national and international scale through artist residencies, festival commissions, conference presentations, and independent works. Over the years, Bello has concentrated on contemporary performative methods which seek to break down the conventional barriers between performer and audience while refining his distinctive approach known as Existence Theatre. For over twenty years, he has partnered with artist Elisabeth Eitelberger, whose contributions have been essential to their artistic endeavours and theoretical explorations. Together, they established ART IN PROCESS, a collective based in Perth, Australia, dedicated to participatory performance concepts.
Elisabeth Eitelberger
Australian performance artist, born and raised in Austria. She is a clinically registered psychotherapist and arts therapist, holding a Master’s degree in Philosophy along with studies in Art History and Theatre Studies from the University of Vienna. Furthering her education, she earned a Clinical Master’s in Creative Arts Therapies from Murdoch University in Perth based on psychodynamic/psychoanalytic training. Elisabeth has engaged in various artistic disciplines, including performance, live art, theatre, movement, and visual art. She has served as a performer, mentor, and performance trainer for ensemble members and participants of the Existence Theatre, contributing to projects and social art collaborations both in Australia and internationally. Alongside her artistic endeavours, she is dedicated to her work as a mental health professional, specialising in complex and transgenerational trauma.
Kateřina Hejnarová is a screenwriter, researcher, and radio author. She graduated from the Radio and Television Dramaturgy and Screenwriting Department at JAMU, where she now teaches while pursuing her PhD degree at JAMU. As a researcher she is intrigued by the matters of narration, the possibilities of composing a dramatic story and its potential within the framework of intrapersonal and intergenerational dialogue. In her doctoral research, she investigates these matters within the framework of the legacy of Czech-American screenwriter Frank Daniel. As an author, she is interested in non-fictional themes, their (re)interpretation and the search for out-of-time layers in them. She feels close to the francophone environment, having published the results of her research in the Belgian film periodicals Humbug and Snapshots and completed internships at the Théâtre National de Bretagne in Rennes and the Théâtre de la Massue in Nice. Aside from JAMU, she collaborates with Czech Radio as a scriptwriter and cultural journalist.
Researcher and lecturer specialising in visual and puppetry theatre, new media art, multimedia practices, exhibition-making, modern and contemporary art, history of stage design and the European avant-garde. An experienced exhibition curator and author of educational projects, actively engaged in both academic research and artistic practice. Develops interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of art and technology. Posthumanist and futurologist.
Maria Oiva is a performance artist and theatre director whose work explores spectatorship, power, and embodied experience in contemporary performance. For over two decades, she has developed performances often placing the spectator’s body and perception at the centre of the work.
In recent years, her practice has focused on examining how artificial intelligence and digital systems operate as performative agents on stage. As a founding member of the #digiteatteri collective, she has created works in which algorithmic systems, language technologies, and networked media actively shape dramaturgy, presence, and interaction. For this pioneering work at the intersection of theatre and technology, she received the TINFO Award in 2019.
At the core of Oiva’s artistic practice are questions of power, gender, and sexuality, and how these are performed, constructed, and destabilised in live situations. Her site-sensitive and durational works create conditions in which normative structures become visible and open to questioning.
Dr. Žilvinas Vingelis is a Lithuanian theatre director, an Assistant Professor, artistic researcher, and Head of the Department of Acting and Directing at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, and co-founder and Artistic Director of the visual theatre company Kosmos Theatre. He has created around fifteen stage productions across drama, puppetry, opera, and visual theatre, exploring how bodies, images, and technologies interact on stage. His practice spans both text-based, conventional drama productions and textless, postdramatic works in visual theatre, as well as interdisciplinary projects and installations, VR-based theatrical developments, and collaborations with technicians, programmers, media artists, and composers.
In 2025, these practices culminated in the successful defence of his doctoral artistic research project, Media Montage in Visual Theatre: Directing Presence and Absence (honorary member of the defence committee Prof. Heiner Goebbels). Alongside his artistic work, he teaches theatre directing to BA directing students and intermedial and visual theatre to MA acting and directing students, and supervises students’ artistic research projects. Internationally, he has participated in festivals, lectured at theatre schools, and presented at conferences on visual theatre and technology–performance relations across more than six countries and over twenty events.
Alyssa Ridder is a freelance costume designer and doctoral researcher at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. Her research investigates digital costume design in real time virtual reality performance. Alyssa’s virtual costume design praxis is rooted in 15 years of experience in costume design and production for live performance. She is an advocate for ethical design approaches and an industry leader in integrating digital tools with traditional costume techniques for more accessible and sustainable production workflows. Alyssa previously served as faculty of costume design & technology at Metropolitan State University of Denver and holds an M.F.A. in costume design from The Pennsylvania State University.
Cèlia Tort Pujol (Vic, Catalunya, 1995) is an oboist, performer and researcher currently based in Antwerp. She graduated cum laude from her music master's degree in June 2020 at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. Cèlia explores new contexts of music creation and interdisciplinary collaboration where to bring the oboe along. She also leads workshops around collective creation and improvisation, using both music and theatre. She has performed in Catalonia, Spain, Andorra, Italy, The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Slovenia, Slovakia, Latvia, Estonia, England, the US and the UAE. Apart from playing with contemporary music ensembles and making music through free improvisation, her practice nowadays focuses on performative AI in the context of the Flemish research group the Algorithmic Gaze.
Myrthe Bokelmann (they/them, 1998) is a dance maker, dance performer and researcher based in Antwerp. They work in interdisciplinary collaborations as a freelancer and within the research group the Algorithmic Gaze at Sint Lucas. Their interest goes towards bodily perception and expression of sound, movement and tactility, as well as finding common languages to create in across disciplines. Myrthe has worked with choreographers such as Claudia Bosse, Eilit Marom, ashleyho+domeniknaue and LeineRoebana, and has created together with other artists in 'notthecenter' collective, Guterstoff Festival, Jenna Vergeynst and CUSK collective. Within the context of The Algorithmic Gaze, together with their colleagues they set up RAIVE, an interdisciplinary summerschool for young makers. Myrthe hopes to create art that is as honest and playful as possible.
