Ada Mukhína is a nomadic artist, theatre director, author, interdisciplinary researcher and performer. She creates political, investigative and participatory theatre performances across genres and borders that often invite the audience to step in. When researching topics, she draws inspiration from interviews, spaces, and collaborations with artists from different parts of the world. Her bold performances often investigate power structures as well as distribution of resources, risks and privileges. With humour and lightness of touch, she questions the existing systems and critiques both worlds of politics and performance.
She was born in 1988 in St. Petersburg, lives in Berlin and works internationally. Before turning her career to performing arts, she received a Law Diploma with distinction and spent seven years immersed in the fields of human rights and civic education. In 2012, she founded Theatre Project Vmeste, a collaborative theatre group that created socially engaged, documentary, and community-based projects in non-conventional theatre spaces. In 2015, after earning an MA with distinction from the Saint Petersburg Theatre Academy, she moved to Berlin as a German Chancellor Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2017, she completed her director internship at Rimini Protokoll’s production at Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus with the stipend from the Goethe-Institute and International Theatre Institute. In 2018 as a Chevening Scholar, she received her second MA with distinction (Advanced Theatre Practice) from London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Starting fall 2025, Ada Mukhina is doing her PhD in Artistic research at the interdisciplinary Institute for Open Arts (Mozarteum University) in Salzburg, Austria, on the topic Energy: Burnout Artist in a World on Fire.
Her work has been presented i.a. at the Berliner Festspiele, the Deutsches Theater and Sophiensaele in Berlin, Theater Rampe in Stuttgart, Staatstheater in Mainz, Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, Neimënster in Luxembourg, the Camden People’s Theatre in London, Toplocentrala in Sofia, Frascati in Amsterdam and at Deutschlandfunk and WDR Radio. She directed and co-created critically acclaimed feminist and political theatre pieces such as Locker Room Talk and Caries of Capitalism, which were listed among the most remarkable theatre productions of the season by the Golden Mask National Theatre Award and nominated for the Grand Prix Sergey Kuryokhin Contemporary Art Award. Her most recent theatre performances include a participatory series about risk in art and artists at risk, Risk Lab, a humorous lecture-performance about the Western art market, How to Sell Yourself To the West, a performative walk to the places of exile in the city, Exile Promenade, a collective performance about money, power and art No More! White Money and a gig theatre performance about survival strategies between far right governments and gig capitalism School of Survival.
Ada Mukhína was awarded i.a. a Fellowship from the Berlin Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts), a Global Exchange Stipend in South Africa from the Federal State of Berlin, the Institute français x Cité internationale des arts residency in Paris, and a Fellowship of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics from the Georgetown University (Washington DC). She published texts in various languages in Deutsche Bühne, Journal der Künste, Teatr, Eye-to-Eye Magazine, Indent: Body and Performative, etc. She is a visiting lecturer in the arts school in Germany and the UK, and a mentor for transnational artists at the Performing Arts Program Berlin. She is frequently invited to be a jury member as well as speaker on issues such as arts and politics, including her appearances at Theater podcast’s Episode 45 (React on War with Active Desperation) together with Birgit Lengers and the European Festivals Association’s documentary Take 5* together with Romeo Castellucci, Nele Hertling, Haris Pasovic, and Serge Aimé Coulibaly.