Research Team
David Drozd is Associate Professor of Theatre Studies at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. He is a dramaturg, translator and theatre theorist. His main research fields are performance analysis with a focus on modern and postmodern Czech theatre culture, especially directing, and structural and semiotic theatre theory, with a special focus on the Prague Linguistic Circle and the history of Czech theatre theory as such. He has edited the Theatre Theory Reader: Prague School Writings (2016).
Pavel Drábek is Professor of Drama and Theatre Practice at the University of Hull, United Kingdom. He publishes on theatre theory, early modern theatre history, and drama translation and adaptation. He is also a playwright and translator in spoken drama, radio, and opera. He has collaborated with Prague Quadrennial as a member of the International Team and programme curator since 2017.
Tomáš Kačer is Associate Professor of English Literature at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. His main research interests lie in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American theatre and performance culture, American and British Modernist theatre and twentieth-century playwrights. He is the author of the first Czech-language history of early American drama before 1916. He is also a translator of fiction, non-fiction and plays.
Josh Overton is Artistic Director of From Below Theatre, a Sunday Times award-winning playwright and a poet, a writer of musicals and opera, a director of theatre, a hip hop lyricist, a dramaturg, a musician, a YouTube scriptwriter, a fire spinner and circus performer, a part-time master’s student, a copy editor for theatre journals and theatres across Europe and was, briefly, a voice of local radio. At the moment he is working on an opera libretto, a musical and two plays.
Šárka Havlíčková Kysová
Šárka Havlíčková Kysová is associate professor at Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic), Department of Theatre Studies. In her research and lecturing activities, she focuses on the theory of theatre (especially from the perspective of cognitive studies), and the staging of opera (especially Czech stagings of operas by Claudio Monteverdi, Giuseppe Verdi, Richard Wagner, and Bedřich Smetana). At present she focuses on the application of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Conceptual Blending Theory and Multimodal Metaphor Theory in the field of the analysis of opera production practice and reflections on directing operas.
Dita Lánská
Dita Lánská studied Theatre Studies at the Department of Theatre Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno, where she also participated in a research project. She is interested in the history of Czech theatre theory. From 2013 to 2017, she worked in the academic department library.
Since 2017, she has been the head of the Theatre and Film Department at the Municipal Library of Prague. In 2018, she completed a retraining course for librarians. From 2020 to 2022, she also co-organised the HUMAIN conference, which focused on artificial intelligence in art, design, and the humanities. She has participated in projects focusing on media and information education. She is the author of an e-book based on interviews with long-term employees and users about the history of the Municipal Library of Prague. Since 2023, she has been vice-chairwoman of the Czech Society for Theatre Research.
Martina Musilová
Martina Musilová focuses on 20th century acting and the theory and anthropology of acting. She graduated from the Theatre Studies programme at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, where she completed her doctoral studies in 2007. During her studies, she attended Dialogical Acting courses with the Inner Partner at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. She has been a teaching assistant in this discipline since 1999. She has worked at the Department of Theatre Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno since 2009, and at the Department of Authorial Creativity and Pedagogy since 2019. Since 2022, she has been the head of the Institute for Research into and Study of Authorial Acting at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. She is the editor of E. Jandl and F. Mayröcker's Experimental Plays and G. Stein's To Speak and to Listen.