Bio | un-formula.com

Nazanin Bahram

Nazanin Bahrami is a performance artist and theater maker whose work unfolds at the intersection of performance, collage, and painting. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Acting and Directing from the University of Tehran and a Master’s in Applied Theatre Studies from Justus Liebig University Giessen. In 2017, she founded the research-based art collective “Un-formula,” which cultivates dialogue between performance and visual art while embracing social and cultural practices. Committed to examining art’s role in society, she deepened her expertise through the “Art as Social Practice” continuing-education program. Her creative practice centers on the performative investigation of mourning and death, with a special focus on gendered dimensions of grief. Through lecture-performances, dance, and other formats, she explores how female bodies experience mourning, protest, and resistance over time.

Omid Mashhadi

Omid Mashhadi Abdolrahman is a scholar of performance studies as well as a theatre director and performance artist. In 2011, he founded and has since co-directed the research-artistic group “Still Life” in Iran, which aims to merge the performing and visual arts, while adopting the theoretical achievements within disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, such as media studies, cognitive linguistics, cultural studies, and sociology. His research interests center on the interrelation between cultural transformations and the concepts of performativity, theatricality, and mediality, both in literary-artistic productions and creative-subversive practices of everyday life. Against this backdrop, he investigated the effects of the mediality of online platforms on the contemporary landscape of critical literature for his MA thesis (entitled “A Study on the Impact of the Theatre Critiques and Reviews in Social Networking Websites on the Contemporary Performances in Tehran). His Ph.D. project grew out of his MA thesis, transferring and expanding the study of ‘literature outside the editorial hierarchies’ from the textual sphere of criticism to the intermedial realm of performance, focusing on the political and cultural implications of amateurism in performing arts.
He was a Fellow at the EXC “Temporal Communities” from January to June 2021, and Since October 2021, He is a member of both the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies and the EXC “Temporal Communities”, where he works as a doctoral researcher on the project “Counter Narrative Potency of Amateur Performance: An Aesthetic Strategy”