Cross-Disciplinary Director
Maria Åberg is a theater director, performance maker, and the founding and artistic director of PROJEKT EUROPA, an artist collective, advocacy group and arts organization creating migrant-led, multi-lingual work at the intersection of performance, co-creation and participation.
She works across disciplines to develop human-centered, authentic and complex performances using methods of horizontal and inclusive devising and story gathering. Her practice exists in the collision of participation and performance, working with individuals - artists and non-professionals - from a migration background to explore notions of identity, locality and the juxtaposition between personal and collective history. By working multilingually she actively challenges the colonial assumption that underpins the dominance of any one language in the performance arena. As a result, her work is often choreographic, focusing on the imperfect body as a site of knowledge and experience and the physical/visual as the central gesture of expression.
She has worked across a wide range of settings - starting off in larger established institutions and theaters and as her practice has developed and moved closer to participatory performance, her work has moved to art galleries, non-traditional performance spaces and the outdoors.