DOROTA SAJEWSKA
Dorota Sajewska is a professor at the Department of Theatre Studies at the Ruhr University Bochum. Her research focuses on performative arts and theories in a comparative perspective, taking into account local as well as global, European and non-European manifestations of social, cultural and aesthetic performances. Her research interests include body anthropology and body-based arts, performative concepts of commonality, the ephemerality of artistic processes, the performativity of archival processes, and more-than-human forms of agency.
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From 2016 to 2023, Dorota Sajewska was assistant professor of Interart (Eastern Europe) at the University of Zurich, where she was also a member of the Centre for Art and Cultural Theory and of the advisory board of the graduate programme Cultural Analysis. It was in Zurich that she began her long collaboration and intellectual friendship with Fabienne Liptay.
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Since 2004 she has been teaching and researching at the Department of Cultural Studies (Section of Theatre and Performance) at the University of Warsaw, and from 2003 to 2007 she also lectured at the Faculty of Theatre Studies at the Warsaw Theatre Academy. In April 2017, she completed her habilitation at the University of Warsaw, with a thesis on the performativity of archiving processes of the First World War, which was published in English in 2019 under the title Necroperformance: Cultural Reconstructions of the War Body (DIAPHANES).
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From 2018 to 2023, Dorota Sajewska led the SNSF-funded research project Crisis and Communitas on performative concepts of commonality in art and culture (www.crisisandcommunitas.com). The follow-up book to the project, published by Routledge, is a critical examination of current theoretical and aesthetic projects of commonality, focusing on moments of sharing, the formation of temporary bonds and affective communities.
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Alongside her academic work, Dorota Sajewska has been involved in the international theatre and arts scene for over 20 years. She has worked as a dramaturge for numerous productions, as a programme coordinator for theatre festivals, and as an author of theatre and film scripts, performance lectures and performative installations. As chief dramaturge and deputy artistic director of Teatr Dramatyczny in Warsaw (2008-2012) and artistic co-director of the WARSZAWA CENTRALNA International Theatre Festival, she worked with theatre, performance and video artists* from all over the world, including Ron Athey, Franco B., Frank Castorf, Constanza Macras, Karol Radziszewski, Aernout Mik, Suse Wächter, Artur Å»mijewski.
Since 2018, she has been collaborating with the choreographer Alexandra Bachtzetsis, with whom she founded the OPEN STUDIO in Zurich in 2020, conceived as a laboratory for performative situations.
In 2024, together with Fabienne Liptay, she founded The Institute for Performance and Film Expanded.​
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