Berner Bühnengespräche

Mirjam Berger, born in 1990, holds a BA in Theater Studies, Business Administration, and Sustainable Development from the University of Bern. She is a freelance lighting designer and performer, a member of the ultra collective, and technical co-director of the auawirleben theater festival in Bern. She is also a co-founder and active member of the art+care network (supported by m2act), which is committed to ensuring that care and art fit into one’s life. As a lighting designer, she works with Joshua Monten and Milva Stark, among others. In 2024, she wrote her first play, «Sehe Dich» (See You), together with Andreas Berger, in which she appeared on stage with Silvia Jost and Christine Hasler (premiere: April 24, Tojo Theater Bern, further guest performances in Biel, Solothurn, and Mühleberg). She is currently working with ultra on their next play, «The Art of Decay», and is the technical director for Swiss Dance Days (February 2026 in Bern). Themes that accompany her work include care in all its facets, climate justice, raising awareness of discrimination, and solidarity.

Ntando Cele was born in Durban, South Africa, and lives in Bern. She studied theater in Durban before completing a multi-artistic education at DasArts in Amsterdam. Together with Raphael Urweider, she founded Manaka Empowerment Prod. in 2013. Her performances play with the boundaries between theater, video installation, concert, and performance. With humor and statements that are often politically incorrect, she addresses hidden racism in everyday life. She combines music, text, and video to cheerfully dissect prejudices and stereotypes and confront the audience with their own perceptions. In February 2020, Cele invited her fellow artists to discuss issues of racial freedom and the boundaries faced by artists of color in a satirical discussion entitled «Enemy of Progress» as part of the That’s not so simple festival at the Schlachthaus Theater Bern. In Vidy, she presented «Black Off» during the Programme Commun 2019 and «Go Go Othello» in 2020.

Yvonne Schmidt (she /her), is a professor, founder and head of the EcoArtLab and responsible for the research field of art education at the Institute Practices and Theories in the Arts at HKB /BFH. She teaches and researches on arts-based research, transdisciplinarity, performance and disability, art (mediation) and climate change, curating as political practice and the (digital) transformation of cultural institutions, including the research projects «Aesthetics of the Im/Mobile» (2022–2026) and «EcoArtLab. Relational Encounters between the Arts and Climate Research» (2023–2027), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. She is co-president of the Swiss Association for Theatre Research and founder of the «Performance & Disability» network of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR). In this context, she has curated encounters between scholars and artists in Asia, Europe, and South America for a decade. Before she joined HKB, she was a Lecturer and Deputy Head of the Institute for the Performing Arts and Film (IPF) at ZHdK, where she initiated and led various research projects and established the international PEERS for emerging artistic researchers as well as a PhD program. After studying theatre and dance studies and literature in Bern, Paris, and Mainz, she received a PhD in Theatre Studies at the University of Bern (2013). She was a research fellow at UIC Chicago and at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Yvonne has worked for different performance festivals, and created formats that foster a dialogue between arts, sciences, and society.