Olena Apchel

Director Theatertreffen 2023

Olena Apchel is an artivist, theatre director, playwright and curator of art projects. She holds a doctorate in Cultural History and Theory, lectures on contemporary theatre and teaches master classes in directing, acting and onstage movement. From 2010 to 2015, she taught at the Kharkiv State Academy of Culture. She has worked as a co-author and trainer at the TESTO Author’s School of Acting in Kharkiv since 2014. In her research practice, her interest lies in processes of alternative systems of existence and management of cultural institutions. As a director, she engages mainly with themes of personal and historical traumas and social violence. She also works with themes of alternate reality. She is author of the socio-theatrical project “Opositorium”, which explores zones of tolerance of interreligious dialogue in contemporary societies.

From 2017 to 2019, she was artistic director of the Lesya Ukrainka Lviv Academic Drama Theater, where, among other things, she created the award-winning post-documentary play “Horyzont 200”. From 2019 to 2020, she was involved in the conceptual development of the main exhibition at the Territory of Terror, the Memorial Museum of Totalitarian Regimes in Lviv. In 2019, she directed the autobiographical play “Wiezi” at the Wybrzeże Theatre in Gdańsk, earning her the award for Best Directorial Debut from the Festival of Previews in Bydgoszcz. In 2021, she directed “Kreszany”, which premiered at the Divine Comedy International Theatre Festival in Kraków. Until summer 2022, Olena Apchel had projects in the Social Projects department of the Nowy Teatr International Centre of Culture in Warsaw. In addition, she is co-author (with Yulia Krivich) of “Słownik/Словник/Vocabulary”, an open roundtable discussion on migration, as well as “New Neighbors” (co-author Helena Szwiegocka), a social project for people who have experienced migration.