Ivan Stanev

Ivan Stanev (Иван Станев, born 29 June 1959, died 1 December 2023) was an author, theatre and film director, scenographer and new media artist, who has been living in Berlin since 1988, and more recently in Paris.

Ivan Stanev was born in the city of Varna, Bulgaria.

His mother, Donka Raikova, was a lawyer and poet and his father, Stanju Stanev, was an engineer and photographer.

He enrolled into a German-language high school, while also studying intensively French, Russian and English.

He got his degree in Theatre Directing from the National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts in Sofia.

While a student in the academy, he founded a clandestine avant-garde theatre group, which led to severe conflicts with censorship in Communist Bulgaria.

Not allowed to work as a theatre director anymore, he went on to study philosophy at the Sofia University, and started to translate the works of Theodor Adorno and Heiner Muller, in the meantime writing plays, poems and essays, all to be published much later.

In 1988, he was invited to present his theatre production called The Wound Woyzeck at a theatre festival in West-Berlin.

He decided not to return to Bulgaria and to live in exile instead.

He began to write in German and to stage his own plays in Berlin.

Since 1999, he has also worked on several major Franco-German theatre productions.

Due to his growing interest in visual arts, he directed and produced two experimental films: Villa Dei Misteri and Luxor Las Vegas.

In 2009 he finished his first independent feature film, shot on 35 mm, called Moon Lake, produced by Donka Angelova.

He lived in Berlin and Paris and worked in both Germany and France.

He passed away on December 1st 2023.