Stephan A. Shtereff

STEPHAN SHTEREFF is an artist, producer, and well‑known television presenter with an international career. He appears in theatre, cinema, and on television, and plays an active role in creating local and international cultural initiatives, festivals, and forums. He began his theatrical career in 1985 at the Children’s and Youth Theatre of the Children’s Palace, performing in a troupe led by Nikolay Aprilov and Antonia Dragova. One of the theatre’s productions, Pancho Panchev’s The Great Treasure, was recorded and released on gramophone record by Balkanton, the songs being composed by Toncho Rusev. In 1991, he enrolled in the experimental theatre class “4XS” at the 22^nd Georgi Sava Rakovski High School in Sofia. He has mentioned in interviews that he had to repeat 9th grade because he was a year older, having transferred from the Second English Language High School in Sofia. After graduating from the 12th grade, the students were invited to establish the unique theatrical and creative formation Studio 4XS Theatre, created by director Nikolay Georgiev. The abbreviation stands for Studio for Synthetic Stage Arts and has long been part of the group’s aesthetic credo. He completed his higher education at Plovdiv University in the Synthetic Stage Arts programme, and continued his training at the International School of Theatre Anthropology in Amsterdam and the Maastricht Summer University in Germany, where he studied acting in different cultural contexts. He also trained in the Body Unlimited programme at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, as well as in the danceWEB scholarship programme in Vienna. He has participated in numerous productions at the Experimental Satirical Variety Theatre in Gabrovo. Since the beginning of the 2000s, he has been working mainly abroad. He collaborates with Alan Good, Xavier Le Roy, Nandana Kiron, Tomi Janežič, Dalia Achi, and many others. He is the initiator and co‑founder of several projects dedicated to the development of contemporary dance and theatre, including the International Festival for Contemporary Dance and Performance “Antistatic,” launched in 2008, and “Night of Theaters.” The project Nonument, created by Stephan Shtereff in collaboration with the German collective LIGNA, which specializes in media arts and performance, won the National Theatre Award Icarus 2020 in the category “Contemporary Dance and Performance.”