Board of Directors Episode 15: Irina Kruzhilina

Irina is an award-winning multi-hyphenate theater maker whose various hats include director, scenographer, experience designer, professor, playwright, and artistic director.

Raised in Moscow in an intercultural household with a Ukrainian mother and Georgian father, Irina creates work that grapples with social issues, exploring identity, displacement, and belonging. Since 2000, Irina has created over two dozen performances spanning interdisciplinary downtown theatre, large-scale parades, opera, and site-responsive installations. Her work has been shown at Times Square, Tokyo Disney, BAM, Prague National Theatre, the NY Philharmonic, the XXI Commonwealth Games, and Barbican Center.

Currently, her work centers on two primary forms: site-specific performances and socially engaged projects with community members to address issues like immigration, polarization, conflict, and peacebuilding.

Relentless in her ambition and risk-taking, Irina pushes the boundaries of theatre to create work that is both artistically daring and socially urgent. Irina launched SpaceBridge, a theatre workshop and devised performance uniting 19 refugee and American children, most of whom had never been on stage. Leading a team of 60 collaborators, Irina transformed their stories into a fully realized Off-Broadway production. After being named a critics’ pick at the 2025 Under The Radar Festival, she is expanding her workshop curriculum to develop new SpaceBridge performances with local and refugee youth in the U.S. and globally.

Irina is the founder of Visual Echo, a New York-based performance organization fostering generative dialogues among people from diverse backgrounds who rarely intersect.

Irina is an associate professor at the New School of Drama, where she co-developed a new MFA program in Contemporary Theatre and Performance. She is a La MaMa resident artist and recipient of the 2024 Joan D. Firestone Fund Award and the 2024 Elliot Norton Award.