Tara Manić

Tara Manić, born 1994, is a theatre director and assistant professor at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade (Serbia), where she has been working with students for nearly a decade. Her work is drawn to intimate female experiences, exploring the body and personal and societal traumas – including abuse, manipulation and sexual violence – approached with tenderness, restraint and poetic sensitivity. She is interested in theatre as a space of proximity between performers and the audience, often unfolding without theatrical darkness or conventional stage separation to create a shared, attentive presence.

Her work emphasises the immediate presence of the actor – skin, voice, scent, bod and vulnerability – in spaces stripped of conventional staging. Her production How I Learned to Drive has toured internationally, appearing at important festivals across Europe as well as in cities in Serbia without local theatres, opening space for dialogue around taboo subjects such as pedophilia and incest.