Bio
Joanna Lewicka (1980) is a theatre-maker, theatre director and lecturer based in Berlin. Born in Silesia and raised between Poland and Germany, since 2004 she has directed numerous productions for state theatres, independent venues and festivals. She has collaborated with NGOs, most prominently on Khmer Reconciliation projects in Cambodia. She teaches Principles of Acting at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Stuttgart. In 2019 she co-founded the Foundation From East To West.
Recognitions
2024 Deutscher Theaterpreis DER FAUST (for Antigone)
2022 Research funding from Fonds Darstellende Künste
2021 GVL Scholarship
2020 Scholarship from the Polish Ministry of Culture
2020 Scholarship “Global Berlin 2020” from the Berliner Senat
2020 Nomination for the best direction of a musical performance (PL)
2019 Stanisław Hebanowski Award Klasyka Żywa IV
2018 Nomination for the Person of The Year 2017 (Culture category) from local Polish press
2017 Nomination for the International Theatre Day Prize of the City of Lublin
2016 Nomination for The Best Theatre Production of the 2015/16 season in Lublin
2016 Nomination for the Woman of the Year from Gazeta Wyborcza Lublin
2016 Nomination for Best Cultural Event from Gazeta Wyborcza
2016 Scholarship for the project Seven Wishes
2015 Scholarship for the project +Love
2012 Award for the Cultural Event of the Year from Gazeta Wyborcza
2004 Scholarship from the Tanz der Künste, Hochschule für Musik und Darstellender Kunst Frankfurt am Main
I was born in Silesia and raised between Poland and Germany. When I was 10 my family settled down between Konstanz and Stuttgart. My double national identity and cultural heritage must have contributed to my way of seeing theatre: I seek to tell stories that break boundaries of established languages, canons and spaces. My most defining quality is the desire to understand different cultures and social groups thoroughly.
I’ve studied Romance Languages, Philosophy and Media Studies at the University of Konstanz, learning French, English and Italian. I moved on to study Theatre Directing at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts, where I got employed as the personal assistant of the Dean of the Hessian Theatre Academy. I learned the craft from Hans Hollmann, Manfred Beilharz, Christof Loy and Jürgen Drescher, and gained experience by holding assistance positions and traineeships at Schauspielhaus Zürich, BAT Berlin, Staatstheater Wiesbaden and the Ancient Theatre Festival in Trier. For my directing debut I chose Merlin or the Desolate Land by Tankred Dorst, followed by The Party by Sławomir Mrożek, the German premiere of Wolf-Gang by Belgian playwright Tom Lanoye at Theater Gießen, and another Mrożek’s classic, Tango, at Staatstheater Darmstadt and at Staatstheater Wiesbaden.
After graduation I decided to rediscover Poland by directing performances in several Polish cities. I organized The German-Polish Theatre Conference Artistic Terminal Kolberg. At the same time I started the pluriannual collaboration with the Polish Institute Düsseldorf which gave me the recurring opportunity to train German and Polish youth and stage numerous theatre performances in different vanues in Poland and in Germany.
My bond with the city of Lublin started with an invitation to work on a social innovation project aimed at rehabilitation of prison inmates by engaging them as actors in professional theatre productions. Once the project had completed, I started a regular collaboration with Dariusz Jeż, an ex-inmate turned actor, by casting him in I Am Not Afraid Of You, Othello! by Artur Pałyga. Two years later we revisited Shakespeare by staging Midsummer Night’s Dream, created in cooperation with the Prison of Opole Lubelskie and with the Polish National Theatre in Warsaw, and featuring several inmates serving long-term and ongoing sentences. It premiered at the Hołda Human Rights Gala to a large audience sporting high deputies of the incumbent government and acclaimed activists of the Solidarność movement. The production was later selected for the International Theatre Festival Confrontations in Lublin, and acclaimed as The Best Cultural Event of the Year 2012 by the leading Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. It was covered by press in Japan, the US, Dubai, India and France, and became the main topic of Magdalena Hasiuk’s book A Cruel Strange Side of The World. I was subsequently invited to the International Prison Conference at The Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens to deliver a keynote speech, a masterclass and workshops.
Since 2015 I have regularly collaborated with the Khmer Community Development (KCD) in Cambodia within several cooperation and development programmes. I applied the methodology of Augusto Boal’s Forum Theatre to capacity building projects of KCD and other local organizations that deal with conflict management, facilitate reconciliation and protect ethnic minorities in Cambodia.
Since 2016 I have taught at the UMCS University in Lublin. My two courses were Theater in Practice at the Department of Theatre Studies and Principles of Directing in Global Context at the Department of Political Science. I worked on The Seagull by Chekhov and The Trojan Women by Euripides with students from Lublin, and in collaboration with the Kleist Festival 2017 and the Kleist Museum in Frankfurt/Oder I worked with fellow directors from Germany and Russia to stage a show performed by students from Astrakhan, Lublin and Berlin. I have also served as an educator in three Erasmus+ projects in Denmark, Poland and Turkey.
My focus remained on creating professional socially engaged theatre productions. I wrote and directed The Driverless based on Goethe’s Faust, which was performed over thirty times at the art gallery Piękno Panie and featured at the International Festival Retrospektywy in Lódź. My experimental project Vulva was first staged at the Contemporary Art Gallery Labyrinth and later presented to an international festival audiences in Ukraine and Poland. The Polish Mother of Theatre, based on true stories about pregnancy and early motherhood, was listed by the leading press among top three performances of the season in Lublin. Another project, LubLove, included an exhibition, a performance and a performative reading dedicated to social perceptions of love based on personal stories and memorabilia collected from the local community. It was included in the Kulturzug project of the Deutsche Bahn on the Berlin-Wroclaw route and invited to the International Theatre Festival Confrontations. It also resulted with a spin-off creative documentary reportage +LOVE, based on a six-months-long research of love and sexuality as experienced by the elderly.
Many of my productions have a strong focus on female empowerment. In 2018 I joined the Womenstate Collective which enlisted female artists, underprivileged women (including female inmates) and the Grotowski Institute in Wroclaw to create the socio-politically outspoken theatrical performance Womenstate or The Chorus for One Actress. Dedication to women has also fuelled STRYJENSKA. Let’s dance, Zofia! based on the original diary of the Polish painter Zofia Stryjeńska (1891 – 1976), the first women in the history who disguised as a man studied art at the Munich Art Academy. The production involved an extensive research about feminism and freedom, filming almost 100 years later of the actress’s symbolic journey to Paris, Geneva and Munich, and studio recording of the original soundtrack. The performance pre-premiered at the Polish Cultural Institute in Rome, Italy, premiered at the CSK Lublin Opera House, and was presented numerous times in Poland and Belarus.
In 2018 I settled down in Berlin, longing to delve into classic German texts. Since 2020 I teach at Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, dividing my time between Berlin, Stuttgart and other German cities where I direct productions. For example Krankheit der Jugend was co-produced by Volkstheater and HMT in Rostock.
I continued to stage productions in Poland too. In My Beginning Is My End was listed as one of the best dance productions of 2021 by the Teatr magazine and included in the Dance Platform in 2022 and 2024. To bridge Eastern and Western European cultures in 2019 I’ve created the Foundation From East To West, bringing together artists and experts from Germany, Poland and beyond with whom I had collaborated for years.
PHOTOGRAPHS
- Rehearsals
- Rehearsals for Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Polish National Theatre
- Joanna Lewicka and Sohka Chan in Cambodia
- Rehearsals for In My Beginning Is My End
- Team Joanna Lewicka & Aleksander Janas
Collaborators
Aleksander Janas — Anna Langhoff — Vanessa Vadineanu — El Bruzda — Norbert Bellen — Sokha Chan — Franz Dittrich — Lubelski Teatr Tańca — Wicki Kalaitzi — Katarzyna Tadeusz — Olga Osuchowska ⎪ FORMERLY Dariusz Jeż — Artur Pałyga — Michał Jadczak — Marta Keil & Grzegorz Reske and others