Olga Levitan

Olga Levitan is a theatre scholar and a lecturer at the Theatre Studies Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She holds her MA degree in theater theory and history from the Academy of Performing Arts in St. Petersburg and a PhD from Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Having started her professional career as a theatre critic in St. Petersburg and Moscow, she has continued her activities in Israel, teaching at the Hebrew University and at the David Yellin Academic College for Education. In 2015-2022 she was also the chair of the Israeli Center for the Documentation of the Performing Arts at the Tel Aviv University, and the curator of a number of research-based archive exhibitions at Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University, and the Moscow Vakhtangov Theatre. The fields of her research are related to multicultural and cross-cultural theatre phenomena, Jewish and Israeli theatre and to Russian modernistic theatre, and she published numerous articles on these subjects. Her album-book Henry Ripzam. Habima Drawings and Period Photographs (Manchester: Baquis Press) appeared in 2021, and she was a coeditor of the joint monograph The Enigma of Modernism: Viacheslav Ivanov (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Centre D'Etudes Viacheslav Ivanov. Moscow: Vodolei, 2021). She played a major role in the organization of several international conferences and research projects, including the Israeli-German research group "Performing Arts in Postcolonial Western Culture: Jerusalem and Berlin" (2014-2016) and "The Dybbuk: Undisciplining the Archive" conference (2022).