Special Topic
Octavian Saiu, Adjunct Secretary General of IATC and President of the Romanian Section of IATC – Theatre Studies, holds a PhD in Theatre Studies and another one in Comparative Literature. He has published articles in several international journals, as well as eleven books on theatre. Actively involved in various international festivals around the world, he has chaired and given talks mainly at Edinburgh International Festival and Sibiu International Theatre Festival. He has taught, coordinated workshops and offered master classes at universities in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, as well as the Grotowski Institute. He received the Critics’ Award in 2010, the Award of the Union of Theatre Artists (UNITER) in 2013, and was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit by the President of Romania in 2020.
Essays
Yana Meerzon is Professor at the University of Ottawa. She has published on theatre of exile and migration, cultural and interdisciplinary studies. Her books include A Path of the Character: Michael Chekhov’s Inspired Acting and Theatre Semiotics (2005) and Performing Exile – Performing Self: Drama, Theatre, Film (Palgrave 2012). She has also co-edited several book collections and special issues of journals on these topics. Yana is the editor of the “Essay Section” of Critical Stages/Scènes critiques.
Interviews, National and COVID-19 Reports
Savas Patsalidis, Professor of theatre and performance history and theory in the School of English (Aristotle University, Thessaloniki), the Hellenic Open University and the Drama School of the National Theatre of Northern Greece. He is also a regular lecturer on the Graduate Programme of the Theatre Department at Aristotle University. He is the author of fourteen books on theatre and performance criticism/theory and co-editor of another thirteen. His two-volume study, Theatre, Society, Nation (2010), was awarded first prize for best theatre study of the year. His latest book-length study Theatre & Theory II: About Topoi, Utopias and Heterotopias was published in 2019 by University Studio Press. In addition to his academic activities, he writes theatre reviews for the ejournals parallaxi and thegreekplay project. He is currently the president of the Hellenic Association of Theatre and Performing Arts Critics, member of the curators’ team of Forest Festival (organized by the National Theatre of Northern Greece) and the editor-in-chief of Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, the journal of the International Association of Theatre Critics.
Conference Papers
Ivan Medenica (Belgrade, Serbia), works at the FDA as Professor, teaching The History of World Drama and Theatre. He is an active theater critic and has received six times the national award for the best theatre criticism. He was the artistic director of Sterijino Pozorje in Novi Sad, the leading national theater festival in Serbia (2003-2007), to which he brought some important structural changes, especially in the domain of internationalization. From 2001 to 2012, Medenica was one of the main editors of the prestigious journal Teatron. He is a member of the International Association of Theater Critics’ Executive Committee and the Director of its international conferences. He is also member of the editorial board of Critical Stages, the web journal of the Association, and as of October 2015, the artistic director of Bitef Festival (Belgrade).
Performance Reviews
Matti Linnavuori wrote theatre criticism between 1978 and 2013 for various newspapers and weeklies in his native Finland. In 1985, he worked for the BBC World Service in London. Since 1998, he has presented papers at numerous IATC events. In the 2000s, he wrote for Teatra Vestnesis in Latvia. Since 1992, he has written and directed several radio plays for YLE the Finnish Broadcasting Company. In March 2016, his play Ta mig till er ledare (Take me to your leader) premiered at Lilla Teatern in Helsinki.
Book Reviews
Don Rubin is Managing Editor of Critical Stages/Scènes critiques. He is the General Editor of Routledge’s six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre and founding Editor of Canada’s national theatre quarterly Canadian Theatre Review. He is Professor Emeritus of Theatre at York University in Toronto and Founding Director and Former Chair of both York’s Department of Theatre and its MA/PhD Program in Theatre and Performance Studies. His volume Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings is a standard volume on the subject. He is a vice-president and trustee of the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship.