Aksana Haiko

Residence:

LITERARY RESIDENCIES IN WARSAW FOR WRITERS, PLAYWRITERS AND TRANSLATORS FROM BELARUS AND UKRAINE

Multidisciplinary writer, playwright, theatre director, and independent researcher with over 25 years of experience in theatre and writing. Her path in Belarusian culture has evolved from physical theatre to the complex of “theatre of fact”, documentary poetry and essay writing.

For two decades, she worked as the artistic director and playwright of Kryly Khalopa Theatre (in 2001- 2011 – Free theatre), a cornerstone of independent Belarusian theatre. Her shift toward documentary theatre and writing began in 2013 with the project “Histories of Belarus” and the documentary play “Chernobyl,” based on field expeditions to the Exclusion Zone, where she collected oral histories later structured into a dramatic text. She also works as an educator specializing in documentary drama and theatre work with archives conducting workshops in Belarus, Poland, France, the Czech Republic, Lithuania. 

After Kryly Khalopa theatre was forcibly closed by the Belarusian authorities in 2021, she focused on writing. Her current focus is a documentary poetry book that transforms the voices of women from the 1939–1945 archives into a multilingual literary form. In addition, Aksana travels extensively around the world, recording her observations in the form of reportage notes, which she also plans to publish as a book.