Olga Danylyuk

Olga Danylyuk is a British-Ukrainian theatre director, dramaturg, producer, and researcher working across performance, intermedial art, and mediatised warfare. She holds a PhD from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, where her practice-as-research dissertation examined intermedial strategies in the staging of war conflict, an MA from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and a diploma from the Lviv National Academy of Arts. She is Director of I-DO Lab, a theatre and performance company based between London and Kyiv, a Research Associate at the Global Europe Centre, University of Kent, and an affiliated researcher at the Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre. She is a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) and a Fellow of the RSA. Her research focuses on the constructed reality of armed conflict in media, the ethics of unmanned military technologies, and Ukrainian theatre and performance culture. Her immersive promenade performance Contact Line, developed over five years with sixteen teenagers from frontline towns in eastern Ukraine, guided audiences through ten locations to experience the first year of war through children’s letters to an unknown Western friend. She began her career on Broadway as assistant to Tony Award–winning designer Ann Hould-Ward, and has directed at La MaMa Theatre and Joyce SoHo in New York, Camden People’s Theatre in London, and Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kyiv, where she founded the theatre laboratory “Upper Floor” (2017–18). Homepage: olgadanylyuk.com

Selected Bibliography
Danylyuk, Olga. “Ukraine.” In The Routledge Companion to Contemporary European Theatre and Performance, edited by Ralf Remshardt and Aneta Mancewicz. London: Routledge, 2023.
Danylyuk, Olga. “Empire Strikes Back: The 2014 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, Postmodern Spectatorship, and the Battle of Perception in the Public Sphere.” In Intermedial Performance and Politics in the Public Sphere. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.