ANDREA KRÁLOVÁ

She is a graduate of the Secondary Professional School of Applied Art in Prague, history of art at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University (1989-1994) and stage design at the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theatre of the Academy of Performing Art, where she has been teaching since 2002. In 2010 she completed her PhD studies and in 2018 she was appointed Associate Professor. She designs costumes, masks, puppets, objects and stage sets for theatre, film and television. Occasionally, she organizes paratheatrical fashion shows, happenings and social events and is involved in architecture and exhibit design. She has had several solo exhibitions of her free-form work in the fields of painting, woodcarving, printmaking and illustration and has also participated in numerous collective exhibitions of costume and stage design. She was selected as a curator for the Czech National Exhibition at the 10th Prague Quadrennial - an international exhibition of performance design and space. She collaborates with leading theatre and film directors and most Czech and Moravian theatres, as well as film productions.

 

MICHAL ZAHÁLKA

He comes from a puppeteer family from Smiřice in East Bohemia, although he was born and lived in Hradec Králové until he finished his secondary education. He also attended drama and literature classes at the Na Střezině art school, also known as Jesličky. Later he graduated from the Department of Theatre Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, where he is currently a PhD student and external lecturer at the Institute of Translation Studies. He worked as a dramaturg at the Prague City Theatres and as an agent at the Aura-Pont agency. He is a translator (translating mainly plays) but he has also written two comic books and a novel, as a freelance editor he cooperates mostly with the Argo publishing house and as a collaborator of NIPOS-ARTAMA he works at amateur theatre festivals as a lecturer, reviewer or editor-in-chief of festival newsletters (in the current year: PřeMostění, Puppeteers’ Chrudim, Jirásek’s Hronov). His professional interests include French drama and its Czech translations, modern British drama and theatre translation in general. Since 2016, he has been working as a specialized editor at the Arts and Theatre Institute, he is a member of the dramaturgical board of the Divadlo International Theatre Festival in Pilsen and is involved in the organization of the Prague festival of contemporary French drama Sněz tu žábu.

 

JAN ČTVRTNÍK

Jan Čtvrtník is a performer, musician and sound designer. In his work, he focuses primarily on sound as a stage component with an emphasis on the performer’s live action. He also works in specific groups. He is a graduate of the Master’s and PhD programmes at the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theatre at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. He has collaborated with a number of theatre companies (the J. K. Tyl Theatre, South Bohemian Theatre, Drak Theatre, Alfa Theatre, Bajka Theatre Český Těšín, Lampion Theatre) and independent projects (Cirk La Putyka, 11:55, Vzhůru nohama Theatre, Dance Studio Light, projects with Tereza Bartůňková, Stransky Art Company, Temporary Collective, Jiné jeviště). He creates sound installations (National Gallery Prague, Theatrum Mundi, Krakataudio) and composes film music (best music award for the film May the Lord Be with Us at the PIHFF International Film Festival). He is the director of the Menteatrál festival (a festival of professional theatres working with people with disabilities) and the head of educational activities at the Divadlo na cucky Theatre in Olomouc.

 

KATEŘINA DOLENSKÁ

Editor-in-Chief of the Puppeteer magazine, assistant professor at the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theatre at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where she teaches history and theory of puppet theatre, researcher at the Research Institute of Alternative and Puppet Theatre and Theatre in Special Nees Groups at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, member of the Czech UNIMA Centre Committee and UNIMA International Executive Committee, vice-president of the UNIMA Research Commission. She is the main author of the publication Czech Puppetry: Tradition and Continuity, member of a number of expert juries of Czech puppetry festivals (Skupa’s Pilsen, Mateřinka Liberec, Spectaculo Interesse Ostrava).

 

 

 

ZDENĚK A. TICHÝ

Graduate of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, major: theatre and film studies (1985 - 1990). From 1990 to 2001 he was the editor of the culture section of the Lidové noviny and Mladá fronta DNES daily newspapers and later worked in the publishing house and the communication section of the National Library of the Czech Republic (2005 - 2008). For more than two decades he was an assistant professor at the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theatre of the Academy of Performing Arts (1999 - 2022), where he also held the position of Vice-Dean for Student Affairs and Artistic Activities (2006 - 2011). In 2011, he started working for Czech Television, since 2013 in the position of a CT Art channel programmer. In addition to his extensive publishing activity in daily newspapers and professional journals (theatre reviews, studies, reports and interviews), he has co-authored fourteen books, mostly on theatre.