Marina Davydova — theater critic, director, playwright, and producer. She graduated cum laude from the Department of Theatre Criticism at the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts (GITIS/RATI) in 1988 and later defended her PhD dissertation “The Theatrical Nature of English Post-Renaissance Tragedy.” She worked as a senior researcher at the Institute of Art Studies, taught courses on the history of European theater and gave masterclasses on theater criticism at the Russian State University for the Humanities.

Davydova is the author of the monographs "The End of Theatre Epoch" (2005) and "Culture ZERO" (2017), which analyze the past two decades of Russian theater. She also contributed to and edited "The History of European Theater from the Renaissance to the End of the 19th Century". She has received numerous awards for theatre criticism, including the Stanislavsky Award for Best Book of 2005.

For many years, Davydova was the theater reviewer for Izvestia, Russia’s oldest newspaper. Since 2010 until March 2022, she served as editor-in-chief of the journal TEATR.

She co-founded the NET (New European Theatre) Festival in 1998 and led it as artistic director for 23 years. Later she curated the drama programme of the Wiener Festwochen (2016) and was Director of Drama at the Salzburg Festival (2023–2024).

Her work as a director includes "Eternal Russia" (Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, 2017), which won the Special Jury Prize at BITEF 2018; "Checkpoint Woodstock" (Thalia Theater, Hamburg, 2019); and "Trance", part of the international project "Die Neuen Todsünden" (Schauspiel Karlsruhe, 2020). In November 2020, she premiered her first production in Russia, "Diminishing the World". In May 2023, her production "Museum of Uncounted Voices" premiered at Wiener Festwochen in Vienna.

In March 2022, Davydova was forced to leave Russia after publishing an anti-militarist petition on the first day of the war.

She currently lives and works in Berlin.

Sergej Newski was born in 1972 in Moscow and studied at the college of the Tchaikovsky State Conservatory. He later studied composition with Jörg Herchet (University of Music Dresden) and Friedrich Goldmann (University of the Arts Berlin), as well as music theory and music education with Hartmut Fladt (also at the UdK Berlin).

He has received composition commissions from institutions such as Staatsoper Stuttgart, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Ruhrtriennale, Basel Sinfonietta, the SWR Symphony Orchestra, RSO Stuttgart, Klangforum Wien, Collegium Novum Zürich, Musik der Jahrhunderte, MaerzMusik, and ensemble recherche. In September 2012, his opera "Franziskus" premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow under the direction of Philipp Chizhevsky. His opera "Secondhand Time (Boris)" premiered at Staatsoper Stuttgart in February 2020. The world premiere of his music theatre work "die Einfachen" took place in 2021 at the Biennale Musica in Venice.

Performers of his works include Titus Engel, Susanne Blumenthal, Vladimir Jurowski, Teodor Currentzis, Christian Tetzlaff, Natalia Pschenitschnikowa, Sarah Maria Sun, and Jakob Diehl, as well as ensembles such as Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, e ensemble, ensemble mosaik, 2e2m, AuditivVokal, the Arditti Quartet, the Asasello Quartet, and many others.

Sergej Newski has received numerous awards, including the Berlin Art Prize (2014) and First Prize in the City of Stuttgart’s composition competition (2006) for his piece "Fluss" (2005 version). He has been awarded scholarships from Villa Aurora, the German Academy Casa Baldi, Cité Internationale des Arts Paris, the Berlin Senate, the Academy of Arts Berlin, Villa Serpentara, the Wilfried Steinbrenner Foundation, and Künstlerhof Schreyahn. Since October 2022, he has been a member of the Saxon Academy of Arts in Dresden. Sergej Newski lives in Berlin.