About
Born in Basel in 1979 and of Ukrainian, Slovak, French and Jewish heritage, Boris Nikitin is a director, writer and curator of the festival It’s The Real Thing – Basel Documentary Platform.
His artistic practice centres on exploring the non-fictional. Questions concerning the construction of reality and identity, as well as the nature of propaganda, form a continuous thread throughout his theatrical work. Since 2015, Nikitin has explored the relationship between art, illness and vulnerability. These themes play a central role in Hamlet (2016–2023) and in his solo works Essay on Dying (2019–present) and Magda Toffler (2022–present).
Nikitin’s works, many of which tour internationally, are raw and frontal, yet always precisely composed, probing the boundaries and breaking points of aesthetic experience.
Since 2022, Nikitin has been experimenting with live cinema in works including Demons, Demons Berlin, Mixtape and Kids. “Few artists today push theatre to such a critical point as Boris Nikitin,” the German theatre magazine Theater heute writes of his work.
Nikitin was awarded the City of Jena’s J. M. R. Lenz Prize for Drama in recognition of his body of work. In 2020, he received the Swiss Theatre Award. His productions have been invited to the Impulse Theater Festival five times.
"It is the hidden possibilities, a potentiality that remains in the space of the possible, for the sake of which Nikitin builds his experimental arrangements. His theatre invites us to think in the existing beyond the existing as well as its negation about what may come: different from what we expect, critical in every sense, without reason, may be clumsy, in any case beyond the known." (Laudatio Lenz Prize, by Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Professor of Theatre Studies at the Goethe University Frankfurt).