BoD Episode 19: Irina Kruzhilina

Irina is an award-winning multi-hyphenate theater maker whose various hats include director, scenographer, experience designer, professor, playwright, and artistic director.

Raised in Moscow in an intercultural household with a Ukrainian mother and Georgian father, Irina creates work that grapples with social issues, exploring identity, displacement, and belonging. Since 2000, Irina has created over two dozen performances spanning interdisciplinary downtown theatre, large-scale parades, opera, and site-responsive installations. Her work has been shown at Times Square, Tokyo Disney, BAM, Prague National Theatre, the NY Philharmonic, the XXI Commonwealth Games, and Barbican Center.

Currently, her work centers on two primary forms: site-specific performances and socially engaged projects with community members to address issues like immigration, polarization, conflict, and peacebuilding.

Relentless in her ambition and risk-taking, Irina pushes the boundaries of theatre to create work that is both artistically daring and socially urgent. Irina launched SpaceBridge, a theatre workshop and devised performance uniting 19 refugee and American children, most of whom had never been on stage. Leading a team of 60 collaborators, Irina transformed their stories into a fully realized Off-Broadway production. After being named a critics’ pick at the 2025 Under The Radar Festival, she is expanding her workshop curriculum to develop new SpaceBridge performances with local and refugee youth in the U.S. and globally.

Irina is the founder of Visual Echo, a New York-based performance organization fostering generative dialogues among people from diverse backgrounds who rarely intersect.

Irina is an associate professor at the New School of Drama, where she co-developed a new MFA program in Contemporary Theatre and Performance. She is a La MaMa resident artist and recipient of the 2024 Joan D. Firestone Fund Award and the 2024 Elliot Norton Award.

https://irinakruzhilina.com/home/

This monthly gathering invites directors and other theatre makers to come together, share experiences, and seek advice in a supportive community. There is often an isolating nature to directing, and this new space aims to foster connection and collaboration. The Board of Directors is an opportunity to set aside time each month to be alongside members of the Directing community all over the world. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:34

Some artists evolve in ways that feel surprising. And then there are artists whose evolution feels inevitable, like they've simply grown more and fully into something that was always there. Irina Krugelina is one of those artists for me. We first met in 2009 at La Mama Umbria International, when she was working primarily as a designer, but already thinking deeply about space, image, and how visual language tells a story. Even then you could feel that her work was reaching beyond the boundaries of design towards something more expansive. Over the years, as we lost touch and then reconnected, I watched her step fully into that space. Not just as a theater maker, but as an artist deeply engaged with the world around her. Her work now lives at the intersection of performance, activism, and education, from supporting Ukrainian artists to creating projects with refugee communities, always grounded in collaboration and a belief that art can humanize, connect, and cut through barriers. In this conversation, we talk about that journey from Russia to the United States, from designer to director, and now to her role as professor of theater making at the New School. We talk about authorship, collaboration, and what it means to build work that is not only aesthetically compelling, but socially meaningful. It's a conversation about growth, about responsibility, and about the power of theater to meet the world as it is. This is my conversation with Irina Krujellina.