OLGA I. KAZAKOVA

Olga I. Kazakova

Playwright, dramaturg & curator

Belgrade-based playwright, dramaturg and curator working with documentary material, coded languages and participatory forms.She makes plays and performance texts in which politics enters through voices, rules, repetitions and everyday speech.

document · score · voice · code

Bio

Olga I. Kazakova (b. Moscow, Russia) is a playwright and dramaturg based in Belgrade, Serbia. Trained in repertory theatre, she works with documentary material and inventive structures. She spent seven years with Moscow’s New European Theatre Festival (NET), working closely with visiting international artists including Katie Mitchell and Boris Nikitin, and shaping approaches to form, rehearsal and audience experience.Her text-led work draws on real voices, archives and found media. Using text scores, repetition, coded language, sound and visual dramaturgy, she explores power, invisibility, shame, desire and the ways political pressure enters everyday life. Influenced by documentary-theatre workshops with Mikhail Ugarov and Sasha Denisova, she develops projects in close dialogue with directors, performers, artists and composers, treating dramaturgy as a live rehearsal process.Since relocating to the Balkans in 2022, she has been writing increasingly in English, focusing on migration, war, and the loss and recovery of language and identity. Her work has been presented across new-writing, theatre and contemporary art contexts, including Lubimovka Independent Playwriting Festival, V–A–C Foundation / GES-2 and Praktika Theatre in Moscow, Beografija Festival in Belgrade, and Theater an der Parkaue in Berlin. In 2022, she was longlisted for the NEEM Award for Experimental Dramaturgy.

Artist Statement

I write experimental plays because reality often feels too broken to describe directly. So I build forms around it: codes, scores, repetitions, instructions, websites, exercises, stitched photos and AI voices. When speech fails, my characters act with verbs; when fear is in the air, the text becomes code; when the mind fractures after war, I build a score of voices and light.I start with what hits me: headlines, street talk, everyday injustices. I’m now reflecting on shame around identity, family power as a political system, queer experience, and the search for a new home in emigration — often through autofiction.In works such as What If?, For Her, You-Know-Who and The Day of The Unknown Soldier, I use formal constraints, coded language and fragmented structures to make political reality emotionally legible without moralizing. My characters speak to those who can’t answer: the country that pushed them out, the parents they didn’t choose, an imagined beloved.I write from dreams and a stream of consciousness, clinging to reality with interviews, found media, and text chats. Algorithms are part of my grammar: a play with a website inside, a Morse code rhythm, HTML code performing a love letter.I want audiences to be surprised and awake, but never gutted — to have room for humour, interpretations, and an action to take: decode, do an exercise, share a drink. I hope they leave with some meaning for a world on fire.

Selected Works

2026 → BLOOD & BRICKS
Theater an der Parkaue, Berlin / text structure & dramaturgical coaching
Dramaturgical support for a performance on ideological rupture. Worked with the author on the core question, structure and rewrites.

• BLOOD & BRICKS →

2025–present → Lubimovka Fringe
Lead Curator of the experimental programme
Led the curatorial process for the festival’s experimental strand: developed the open call, selection criteria and reader workflow for over 100 submissions; coordinated 16 script readers and a small volunteer team; shaped the longlist and shortlist; and co-curated a two-day public programme of staged readings and discussions for selected experimental plays.

• Lubimovka Festival →

2024 → AN ORDINARY STORY
Beografija Festival, Belgrade / playwright & dramaturg
Verbatim performance on depression, based on an actor’s testimony from Kirill Serebrennikov’s Serbian production of An Ordinary Story (Obična priča). Worked with interview material to structure a stage text while preserving the performer’s original voice.

2023 / rev. 2025 → THE DAY OF THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER
Playwright and director of online staged reading
A fragmented, repetitive play on post-war trauma. In 2023, I directed an online staged reading followed by an audience discussion.

2019–2021 → WHAT IF? / FOR HER / YOU-KNOW-WHO
Experimental play trilogy
A series of plays working with manuals, codes, found documents, translation and performative instructions.

• You-Know-Who / staged reading →