2024 Maya Brin Artist-in-Residence Mikhail Durnenkov

The Maya Brin Residency Program is proud to announce Artist-in-Residence, Mikhail Durnenkov, who will be a visiting faculty member in the SLLC and the TDPS for the Spring 2024 semester.

The Maya Brin Residency Program is proud to announce our Artist-in-Residence, Mikhail Durnenkov, who will be a visiting faculty member in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures and the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies for the Spring 2024 semester.

About the artist

Mikhail Durnenkov is an internationally renowned Russian playwright and screenwriter. He was, until the beginning of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, one of the most produced playwrights in the Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking world. Durnenkov openly denounced the Russian invasion on the day it started; as a consequence, all productions of his plays were ordered to be removed from the repertory of theater companies in Russia, while he and his wife, renowned theater- maker and scenographer Ksenya Peretroukhina, had to leave the country. They currently live and work in Finland.

Mikhail Durnenkov is the author of several dozen plays and screenplays, including Are We At War Yet, Utopia, The Drunks, Easy Way to Quit Smoking, Matador, Nation of Lovers, The Lake, Trash, Untranslatable and The Culture Layer, among many others. His plays have been produced by the most prestigious Russian theater companies, among them The Moscow Art Theatre, Alexandrinsky National Theatre, Taganka Theatre, Sovremennik Theatre, Satyrikon, Krasny Fakel Theatre, Praktika Theater, and The Gogol Center.

Durnenkov is one of the founders of the New Drama playwriting and directing movement in Russia and participated in the legendary Teatr.doc theater company in Moscow. Between 2013 and 2020, he served as the Artistic Director of the Liubimovka Festival, a leading independent forum of new Russian-language playwriting that evolved into the most innovative and prestigious platform in its field and greatly contributed to the extraordinary flourishing of Russian theater that has taken place over the past two decades. He served as Head of the Jury for Playwriting at the Golden Mask Awards from 2014 until 2021. He also served on the faculty of the Moscow Art Theatre School and the Russian University for the Humanities. He has been a guest lecturer at Princeton and Oxford University, and has conducted workshops and completed residencies in the UK (Royal Court, Royal Shakespeare Company), Germany, the Czech Republic, Turkey, and Finland.

Mikhail Durnenkov’s plays have been translated into and published in many languages and produced in the United Kingdom, Germany, Estonia, Romania, Finland, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and the United States. The play that he is most known for outside the Russian-speaking world is Are We at War Yet, written in 2014 in the aftermath of Russia’s open war against Ukraine and its annexation of the Crimea. In the United States, Durnenkov’s plays were most recently printed in the Phantom Pain collection, published by Princeton University Press in 2017. Mikhail Durnenkov is a laureate of multiple professional awards, including the 2019 Golden Mask Award for the best new play (for Utopia) and the Grand Prix at the New Play Festival (for Easy Way to Quit Smoking).

TDPS will be producing Durnenkov’s Are We at War Yet, directed by Yuri Urnov, as part of its mainstage season, with six performances between Friday, April 19 and Friday, April 26.

A mini-conference on the theme of Theater and Authority is planned for Friday, March 29. Durnenkov will be teaching courses in TDPS and in the Russian Department. Many other events, including a series of dialogues with the Artist in Residence, will take place during the course of the semester.

For more information, please contact Zhanna Vernola, Coordinator of the Maya Brin Residency Program: vernola@umd.edu