Iryna Rudenko
About us
Founded in Mariupol in 1992 by director and educator Iryna Rudenko, Mariupol Theatre spent three decades creating performances, educational programmes and community-based artistic initiatives.
Today, under the artistic direction of Evangelos Kosmidis, the company creates documentary, devised, participatory and socially engaged theatre rooted in testimony, memory, resilience and collective creation. Our artists, performers, facilitators and collaborators currently live and work across Ukraine and Europe, continuing the theatre's mission in exile.
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A Theatre Displaced. A Theatre Still Alive
The Mariupol Theatre of Ukraine in Exile exists because a theatre, a city, and a community were violently displaced, but not silenced. The founder and director Iryna Rudenko tragically died during the siege of the city.
After the destruction of our theatre during the siege of Mariupol in 2022, our artists were forced to rebuild their lives across Europe. Today, we continue creating together as a transnational artistic collective, connected through memory, testimony, and shared artistic practice.
What was once a theatre rooted in one city has become a community that crosses borders, languages, and cultures while carrying Mariupol at its heart.
Our mission
We create artistic spaces where personal stories meet collective history.
Through performances, workshops, residencies, and international collaborations, we preserve cultural memory, support communities affected by war and displacement, and create opportunities for dialogue across generations and cultures.
Our work explores questions of belonging, identity, loss, survival, and the possibilities of rebuilding after catastrophe.
We do not research diaspora.
We live it.
Our theatre exists across countries, languages, and time zones. Distance shapes not only how we work, but also how we create.
Without a permanent stage, theatre has become our temporary homeland a place where dispersed lives, memories, and experiences can reconnect. Mariupol remains at the centre of our identity, surviving through stories, gestures, voices, and collective memory carried by those who were forced to leave.
For us, diaspora is not a topic. It is the condition through which we create.
Recognitions
ALASKA is a 2025 laureate of the Art Explora – Académie des beaux-arts European Award, recognising innovative approaches to public participation in the arts.
The play was also included in the European Theatre Convention Drama Committee’s Selected Texts 2022, in partnership with Dakh Theatre – Centre of Contemporary Arts, Ukraine.
