Organizers

Elena Boukouvala is a dramatherapist (MA), counsellor of children and young people (MA) psychologist and a community organizer. She is a PhD researcher of Sociology at Open University (UK) researching enacting citizenship through creative methods. She is teaching Laban, Movement with Touch and facilitates therapy groups for trainee therapists at the postgraduate course of Dramatherapy at Epineio Institute (Thessaloniki). She is also faculty of East Side Institute (New York). She founded PPLG in 2017 with the ongoing support of an international community as a response to refugee policy crisis and the dehumanizing conditions of refugee camps. As dramatherapist, trainer, psychologist, performance activist and artist, she has worked in schools, hospitals, prisons, rehabilitation wards, elderly homes, refugee camps and other community settings in collaboration with social initiatives and international organizations in Greece, UK, Romania, Germany, Hungary, Serbia, Moldova, Lebanon, Algeria (Western Sahrawi camps) and USA. She has also created trainings and consultancies cooperating with organizations such as the International Organization for Migration. She has founded the international interactive exhibition “Dialogues Across Borders” (DAB) which has travelled across Europe, building on poetry and art of the participants and creating opportunities for dialogue and spaces of belonging. During the pandemic she has been researching, teaching and working as a therapist online.

Dan Friedman is the artistic director and co-founder of the Castillo Theatre as well as the associate dean of UX, a free community-based school of continuing development for people of all ages, both programs of the All Stars Project in New York City. He also serves on the faculty of the East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy and is a lead organizer of Performing the World, a bi-annual conference that brings together performance activists, artists and scholars from all over the world. A playwright, director, and grassroots educator, Friedman holds a doctorate in theatre history from the University of Wisconsin and has been active in political theatre and performance activism since the 1960s. He is the author or co-author of 17 full-length plays and is editor of The Cultural Politics of Heiner Muller (Cambridge Scholars Press); Still on the Corner and Other Post-Modern Political Plays by Fred Newman (Castillo); and co-editor of Theatre for Working Class Audiences in the US, 1830-1980 (Greenwood Press). He is currently working on a new book for Palgrave Macmillan, Performance, Human Development and Social Change: Creating Community Creativity.

Elena Boukouvala is a dramatherapist (MA), counsellor of children and young people (MA) psychologist and a community organizer. She is a PhD researcher of Sociology at Open University (UK) researching enacting citizenship through creative methods. She is teaching Laban, Movement with Touch and facilitates therapy groups for trainee therapists at the postgraduate course of Dramatherapy at Epineio Institute (Thessaloniki). She is also faculty of East Side Institute (New York). She founded PPLG in 2017 with the ongoing support of an international community as a response to refugee policy crisis and the dehumanizing conditions of refugee camps. As dramatherapist, trainer, psychologist, performance activist and artist, she has worked in schools, hospitals, prisons, rehabilitation wards, elderly homes, refugee camps and other community settings in collaboration with social initiatives and international organizations in Greece, UK, Romania, Germany, Hungary, Serbia, Moldova, Lebanon, Algeria (Western Sahrawi camps) and USA. She has also created trainings and consultancies cooperating with organizations such as the International Organization for Migration. She has founded the international interactive exhibition “Dialogues Across Borders” (DAB) which has travelled across Europe, building on poetry and art of the participants and creating opportunities for dialogue and spaces of belonging. During the pandemic she has been researching, teaching and working as a therapist online.