Olena Apchel is an artivist, theater director, performer, curator, playwright, and member of SEMA Ukraine and holds a PhD in Art History. In her curatorial practice, she explores horizontal management systems. In her artistic practice, she works with the themes of transgenerational heritage, personal and historical trauma. She was a professor at the Kharkiv State Academy of Culture, worked as the chief director of the Lesia Theater in Lviv, co-authored the concept of the main exhibition of the First Barrack of the Memorial Museum of Totalitarian Regimes “Territory of Terror”, collaborated with the Kyiv Theater “Golden Gate”, Tarnów Theater im. Ludwika Solskiego, Gdańsk’s Teatr Wybrzeże, Sosnowiec’s Teatr Zagłębia, and Krakow’s Laźnia Nowa Theater, and headed the social projects department at the Nowy Teatr International Center for Culture, Warsaw. She is currently the co-director of the Theatertreffen festival in Berlin and a participant of the Revolution of Dignity, Kyiv, Kharkiv and Donetsk Maidans.
Since the beginning of Russia’s war against Ukraine in 2014, she has been actively helping the army and displaced civilians, and since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, refugees abroad. From the fourth year of the war, she started promoting Ukrainian culture abroad, including directing the opening of the first foreign department of the Ukrainian Institute in Berlin and implementing an extensive program of Ukrainian culture presentation in the projects of the German federal institution Berliner Festspiele.