Arkadi Zaides

Arkadi Zaides (b. 1979, Homel, Belarus, former USSR) is a choreographer, performer, researcher, and curator. He holds a master’s degree from the AHK Academy of Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam, a PhD in the Arts (Dance) from the University of Antwerp, and a PhD in the Arts (Drama) from Ghent University, where he is also a visiting professor. From 2024 to 2027, he is an associate artist at Agora – Cité Internationale de la Danse in Montpellier. His work has been presented at festivals, museums, and galleries across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, and he has received several prizes, including recognition from the Émile Zola Chair for Interdisciplinary Human Rights Dialogue for his engagement with human rights issues.

In his artistic practice, choreographer Arkadi Zaides investigates the capacity of choreography to engage with contemporary societal urgencies by working with documentary materials. His multidisciplinary projects continuously navigate between spaces in which structural violence produces specific forms of social choreography, and the artistic space in which these choreographies are interrogated, displaced, and reconfigured though embodied interventions, performative translation, and hybrid staging.