When a world loses its shape

Writer. Publisher. Researcher.

I work at the intersection of literature, performance, artistic research and living archives. My current literary project, A Trilogy of Forgotten Dreams, begins with Ekeby — a novel about memory, guilt, love and the question of what we need to remember in order to dream again.

In 2026, I founded The House of Mr Who in The Hague, an independent publishing house in the Netherlands. For more than twenty-five years, my work has moved between dance, theatre, film, archives, cultural theory and artistic research. What connects these different fields is an ongoing interest in how stories are shaped, remembered and transformed.

I studied Theatre, Film and Television Studies, Musicology and Classical Archaeology, and received my PhD in Media Studies and Aesthetics from the University of Cologne. My dissertation, Digitaler Alltag, was published by Utz Verlag in 2012.

From 2007 to 2009, I worked as Assistant to Pina Bausch. After her death, I joined the Pina Bausch Foundation as Research and Development Manager, where I helped develop its archives and early projects around memory, legacy and cultural heritage.

In 2014, I founded Ekeby Art and Research in the Netherlands. It became a space for work that did not fit neatly within one discipline — bringing together performance, archives, film, artistic research and collaborative production. https://ekeby.center

Over the years, I have worked as a writer, dramaturge, cultural producer, publisher, cultural manager and researcher with institutions, artists and colleagues including Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, the Pina Bausch Foundation, the University of Hamburg, Berliner Festspiele, TANZRAUSCHEN, Performance Studies international, Robyn Orlin, Jukka Rajala-Granstubb and Gabriele Klein.

Projects such as mAPs – migrating Artists project, supported by Creative Europe, and the three TANZRAUSCHEN Screen Dance Academies extended this work into dance film, collaborative research, sustainable artistic practice and transmedia storytelling.

Today, these different strands come together in my writing, publishing and research: in stories that move between memory and imagination, bodies and archives, pasts that remain unresolved and futures that have yet to take shape.

Selected academic publications:

mAPs – The Power of Transformation. A Toolkit for Dance, Film and Social Change (eds. Wagenbach/TANZRAUSCHEN), Wuppertal: TANZRAUSCHEN 2023 – And so you see …: On the Situatedness of Translating Audience Perceptions, in: Michaela Ott/Thomas Weber (eds.), Situated in Translations. Bielefeld: transcript 2019, pp. 191-214 (with Gabriele Klein); Archive des Kolonialen. Übersetzungen kulturellen Erbes im Tanz, in: Knopf/Lembcke/Recklies (eds.): Archive dekolonialisieren, Bielefeld: transcript 2018, pp.191- 206; Inheriting Dance. An Invitation from Pina (eds. Wagenbach/Pina Bausch Foundation), Bielefeld: transcript 2014