Omar Abi Azar is a director and founding member of Zoukak Theatre Company. Since 2013, he has co-directed the Zoukak Sidewalks Festival, a global platform for performing arts. Abi Azar has directed and co-created over 40 plays in Lebanon and internationally. In recognition of his contributions to the arts, he was named a “Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters” by the French Ministry of Culture in 2020. Zoukak Theatre Company has received several awards, including the Culture for Peace Prize from the Chirac Foundation in 2017.
Bisan Al Saadi
Bisan Al Saadi
Bisan Al Saadi is an undergraduate Art History student with a minor in Theater at the American University of Beirut. A Palestinian woman born in 2004 in Damascus, Syria, she has worked in theater production at AUB, serving as part of the core crew and cast of the Arabic adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. Currently in her final year of studies, she plans to pursue a master's degree in Islamic Art and Architecture.
Anastasia Shestak
Anastasia Shestak
Anastasia Shestak (she/her) is a curator, mediator, and cultural projects coordinator based in Leipzig. She holds degrees in Cultural and Visual Studies and is currently enrolled in the Cultures of the Curatorial program at HGB Leipzig. Her professional experience includes roles at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and Taus Makhacheva Studio in Moscow; the Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art in Yekaterinburg; and CuratorLab at Konstfack University in Stockholm. She focuses on alternative educational strategies, art education, and vernacular archives. Shestak’s 2024/25 activity includes the “Kontemåtta” exhibition at the Kin Museum of Contemporary Art in Kiruna, a show on the first women’s civil rights school in Sweden.
Lydia Ziemke
Lydia Ziemke
Lydia Ziemke, born in Potsdam, studied classical philology and theater directing in Edinburgh and London. Since 2011, she has been creating transnational touring theater projects, conferences, and salons with the company suite42, with a focus on collaborations with artists from the Middle East and North Africa, as well as stories centered around the global upheaval of 1989. Her productions have been staged in venues such as the Grips Theatre in Berlin, Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Zoukak Theatre in Beirut, El Hakawati Theatre in Jerusalem, and Theater Münster. Ziemke also co-created the immersive film installation geRecht featuring Corinna Harfouch, currently running at tak Theater Aufbau Kreuzberg in Berlin, where she has been part of the collective management since 2018. Ziemke was nominated for the ITI Germany Prize in both 2021 and 2022.
