RE-Connect
ONLINE
PERFORMANCE
FESTIVAL
* Online Performance Platform
* Digital Theatre Academy
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OUR TEAM
Archive : In-progress
Symposium Academic Committee
Amin Azimi​
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Originally from Tehran, Iran, and now based in Toronto, Amin Azimi is a lecturer, writer, researcher, and director of theatre and cinema. He is a PhD candidate in Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. Amin holds a BA in Dramatic Literature, an MA in Cinema Studies, and has completed specialized training in digital storytelling and video design.
With over a decade of teaching experience, Amin has taught theatre, film, playwriting, dramaturgy, and directing at institutions including the University of Tehran, Tehran Art University, and the University of Toronto. His research focuses on 21st-century dramaturgy, post-dramatic theatre, digital storytelling, and the representation of Iranian social movements on international stages. His academic work has been published in respected journals such as Asian Theatre Journal and Alternatives Théâtrales.
Amin has directed plays by Georges Perec, Peter Shaffer, and Alireza Naderi, and worked as a dramaturg on Oedipus on the Road staged in Paris. His recent creative projects include the play Ain’t at Tehran City Theater and experimental films such as Cookies and Black Hole (2021) and Inferno (2024). Amin’s work reflects his dedication to merging artistic creativity with scholarly research.
Mana. N
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Mana N. is an Iranian writer, performer, and theatremaker who studied theatre. Over the past five years, she has focused on lecture-performances, contributing as both a writer and director/ performer. Her performances have taken her to countries such as Switzerland, Belgium, France, Turkey, and beyond. In her work as a director, writer, essayist, and performer, she delves deeply into the intersections of political and personal themes. Mana takes a broad and exploratory approach to her artistic research, embracing diverse registers and uncovering new performative experiences. Her current projects center on themes of invisible oppression, decolonialism, and the politics embedded in everyday life.
Samira Alirezabeigi​
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Samira is a transdisciplinary scholar affiliated with the University of Leuven (Belgium). Her research is situated at the intersection of the philosophy and sociology of education, artistic practices, and digital media. Her main focus is on critically examining the digitalization of education across multiple disciplines and contexts (namely, school education and art higher education in different countries). She obtained her PhD diploma in educational sciences from KU Leuven and conducted her postdoctoral studies at UCL (UK) and KU Leuven. Recently, she has been directing her studies toward the decolonization of technology in education.
Nima Dehghani​
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Nima Dehghani is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and director whose work bridges the intersections of technology, art, and human connection. With a BA in Architecture from IUST (2012) and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (2016) in digital media and performance art, his practice centers on exploring themes of estrangement, displacement, and social justice.
Nima employs theater, video, participatory digital forums, and online communities to construct hypermediated social architectures.
A core aspect of his research involves the "aesthetics of social behaviors on the Internet," focusing on the democratization of digital spaces and the creation of alternative platforms. By integrating VR, Net-Art, video, and performance, he seeks to reimagine how technology can empower marginalized voices and facilitate meaningful dialogue.
Nima’s work aims to hack conventional modes of communication while promoting creative social justice and the equitable future of the digital sphere.
Qmars Haeri​
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Q-mars Haeri is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. He is a theatre historian and practitioner and holds a PhD from University of Maryland. His research interest is on cultural production in Iran, questioning how we categorize cultural products either with dignity and as sublime, or as degenerate and vulgar, and to what extent these categorizations are influenced by notions of class, and the urban/rural divide. From 2022 to 2024, Haeri served as a faculty member and director of the theatre program at the American University of Kuwait.
Shaghayegh Kamyar​
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Shaghayegh Kamyar is a Tehran-based artist with a photography,
scenography, and art research background. She holds a Master's
Degree in Art Research from Azad Islamic University and has focused
her artistic practice on political and social issues, particularly in Iran.
With a diverse range of skills and experience in various media,
including game design and photography. Shaghayegh was a member of
the curatorial team of the New Media Society and is the founder and
chief curator of DarJaryan Projects (InProgress Projects), a collective
workspace for artists and art researchers. Her recent project, "Art in
Public Space; Art Intervention", reflects her passion for engaging with
social issues through art.
Festival Team
Associate Director
Sara Faradji
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Sara Faradji is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Maryland, where she studies the resonance of contemporary world Anglophone literature. She enjoys teaching global film, literature, and critical theory. As a facilitator of Re-Connect’s virtual global internship initiative, she hopes to connect students with artists and scholars in this collective festival effort.|photo edit: systaime
Art Director and Co-Founder
Nima Dehghani
Nima Dehghani, the co-founder and artistic director of the festival, is a transdisciplinary artist who employs digital technologies to connect people with human experiences of estrangement and displacement. He has developed several immersive performance art projects and virtual platforms that facilitate interactions between the artists and audience from all around the world, borderless.
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ADVISORY BOARD
Ali Momeni
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Ali was born in Isfahan (Iran) and emigrated to the United States at the age of twelve. He studied physics and music at Swarthmore College and completed his doctoral degree in music composition, improvisation and performance with computers from the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at UC Berkeley. Between 2007 and 2011, Momeni was an assistant professor in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he directed the Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Art, and founded the urban projection collective called the MAW. Momeni next served as an associate professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University where he founded and directed CMU ArtFab, a laboratory that’s focused on making complex creative workflows accessible to youth and non-technical folks. Momeni was also a founding faculty member in CMU’s IDEATE program, and contributed to the Music Technology program. In 2018, Ali joined Shield.ai as a Senior Principal Scientist focused on User Experience, and Brown University as a Professor of Practice within the Brown Arts Initiative and Data Science Initiative. In addition to his work in industry and his academic research and teaching, Ali is also co-founder of IRL Labs, an educational technology start-up focused on transforming everyday situations into interactive learning opportunities using everyday technologies. His research interests include educational technologies, human-computer-interaction for performative applications of robotics, playful urban interventions, interactive projection performance, machine learning for artists and designers, interactive tools for storytelling and experiential learning, mobile and hybrid musical instruments, and the intersection of sound, music and health.
Dawn Weleski
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Dawn Weleski’s art practice administers a political stress test, antagonizing routine cultural behavior by re-purposing underground brawls, revolutionary protests, and political offices as transformative social stages. Recent projects include The Black Draft (with Justin Strong), a live mock sports draft event during which ten Black former Pittsburghers, from all professions, are drafted to return home and City Council Wrestling, a series of public wrestling matches where citizens, pro-am wrestlers, and city council members personified their political passions into wrestling characters. She co-founded and co-directs Conflict Kitchen (with Jon Rubin), a take-out restaurant that serves cuisine from countries with which the U.S. government is in conflict, which has been covered by over 900 international media and news outlets worldwide and was the North American finalist for the Second Annual International Award for Public Art in 2015.
Weleski has exhibited at The Mercosul Biennial, Brazil; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose; Anyang Public Art Project, South Korea; The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; Townhouse Gallery, Cairo; Festival Belluard Bollwerk International, Switzerland; The Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh; Arts House, Melbourne; and 91mQ, Berlin; has been a resident at The Headlands Center for the Arts, SOMA Mexico City, and The Atlantic Center for the Arts; is a Fellow at The STUDIO for Creative Inquiry; and is a 2017 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow.
Project Manager
Raha Rajabi
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Raha Rajabi was born in 2001 in Tehran, Iran. After her first years of education, she chose an alternative education system and ultimately graduated from the Mosharekati participatory school in Tehran and the Clonlara school(US). She has done communications, management, and costume design for different theatre companies and participated in national and international festivals like FITS(RO) and Fadjr(IR) as an interpreter. Raha also volunteered in many Social Projects such as Zero Hunger IR and the Child Friendly Network. She currently lives in Tehran and works as an associate producer at the NH Theatre Agency as well as the project manager for Re-Connect online performance festival. Besides her professional activities, Raha often collaborates with national and international cultural, artistic, and social projects.
Visual Designer
Erfan Ashorioun
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Erfan Ashorioun is a digital media artist born in 1995, Esfahan, Iran.
He is a visual artist with music composing and performance art background who uses digital tools in an attempt to represent the concept of deterioration in abstract forms by getting inspiration from nature, organic forms and phenomenons.
Curation Assistant
Jafar Hejazi
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Jafar Hejazi is an interdisciplinary artist who has backgrounds in technology and performing arts, having completed an undergraduate degree in Mechanical engineering and an MA degree in Theatre.
He is interested in exploring the possibilities of the internet to create performance arts on that. Jafar Hejazi’s research interests include Digital Performance, Interactive Media, Social Media and Mixed Reality Tech. He has experienced using the internet as well as some gadgets, such as VR headset, to create engaging artistic projects.
Curation Intern
Virginia Coldren
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Virginia Coldren is a junior at the University of Maryland studying Theatre and Arts Leadership. She is currently the Artistic Director of UMD’s The Muses, an all-female led student theatre group dedicated to amplifying the voices of women and minorities on campus. She recently assistant directed a full virtual version of Machinal by Sophie Treadwell, where they experimented with all new technology for live online theatre. She has also previously acted in numerous shows and has even had experience in the technical realm. She is always eager to learn more about the theatre and continues to work towards her degree passionately.
Research and Curation Intern
Farhan Sonboldel​
My name is Farhan Sonboldel. I was born in 1997 in Karaj (Iran). I’m a senior student in Drama at university of Tehran. My research focus is on political engagement of theatre and dramaturgy of political events in streets and political documents. My activities during my studying theatre at university have been directing theatre and Performance and writing play on Immersive Theatre, Digital Theatre and Documentary Theatre. Also, I research on theatre and performance studies, organizing seminars, workshops and festivals at university. One of my favorite areas of art is interdisciplinary productions in theatre, literature and digital arts and cyberspace.
Curation Intern
Sadaf Amouei Kalareh
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Sadaf Amouei Kalareh is still practicing to be a future art manager. She graduated from Art University of Tehran, with bachelor’s degree in Puppet Theatre in 2019. She has worked with several festivals during her bachelor’s as an executive manager and contributed in several theatre projects. After her graduation she moved to the Netherlands, where she started studying her Master’s in Arts and Culture, Cognition and Criticism. She is currently working on her thesis, which is about the role of technical innovation in the mental health of Iranian artists during the pandemic.
Research and Curation Intern
Alireza khosroabadi​
Alireza is an interdisciplinary artist-to-be. He is studying Theatre Directory at the Art University of Tehran and is working on his thesis through which he questions Traumatic Representation in Beckett's Latest plays. Now he is the curator of the Scoretodo Project, a project about writing instructional pieces and introducing this form of art to Iranian artists and involving them through.
He is currently translating a book about theatre artists in contemporary art. Alireza is interested in Performance Studies and is investigating through daily life acts and Interactive Media.
Graphic Design Intern
Elora Romo
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Elora Romo (she/her) is a 20-year-old graphic designer and printmaker based in Richmond, VA. She is currently a third-year student at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts (VCUarts) pursuing a BFA in Graphic Design with a minor in Painting + Printmaking. Alongside her studies, Elora is also working as a Graphic Design Intern for VCU’s Center for Community Engagement and Impact. Her interests include typography, vector illustration, web design, 2D animation, and printmaking (primarily risography and silk screen, but also lithography and intaglio). Elora's portfolio and contact info can be accessed at eloraromo.com.
