Iris Kovacs

Irisz Kovacs is a Romanian theatre director and visual artist. Her theatre is deeply influenced by her previous work as a documentary photographer (winner of the Superscrieri/Poque Photojournalism Grant in 2020, finalist of the “5 under 30” Grant offered by the Romanian Center for Documentary Photography (CDFD) in 2021 and winner of the ARC Philanthropic Journalism Grant in 2022).

Her performances have been presented at most major theatre festivals in Romania. She has been nominated twice for the UNITER Awards, Romania’s national theatre prizes, and in 2024 received the Iulian Vișa Prize from the Sibiu International Theatre Festival for outstanding directorial vision. Since September 2024 she has been the in-house director at Deutsches Staatstheater Temeswar. At 26, this makes her the youngest person to hold this position in the theatre’s history.

Her work explores the meeting point of the poetic and the political. Drawing on folklore, questions of womanhood, and a lingering sense of impending catastrophe, her performances combine playful irony and a stubborn sense of hope in uncertain worlds.