TRANSITIONS - multiannual program
Biographies of Participants — 5.7.2026 22:00DISCOVER THE PARTICIPANTS FROM THE TRANSITIONS PROJECT
Robert Kocsis
Robert Kocsis is a director who seeks to experiment with artistic forms of expression and focuses, as much as possible, on addressing topics in his projects that don’t often receive attention. He graduated from the Faculty of Theater and Film in Cluj with a degree in theater directing (2020) and a master’s degree in documentary film (2022). In 2023, he was nominated for a Gopo Award for the film Morning Routine, and in 2025 and 2026, respectively, for UNITER Awards for the radio plays Broscoiul and heteroSălăjan (AUZIT. Radio Theater). Among the productions he has directed are Cu Marte pe Marte călcând (2022), Mânui-mi-ai viața (2023), Tema de vacanță (2024), and Sutra 2025 (2025).
Deeply inspired by his personal life in his projects, he seeks to explore the various ways in which vulnerability and self-irony can function on a level beyond the self-referential, and how this can serve as a theme on a macro level. He believes that, in any work environment, the most important thing is to be human, for there to be a sense of relaxation, and for failure not to be something to fear, but rather something that shapes us further. He views art as a space for questioning daily routines and human contradictions, seeking to find different forms of dialogue through the lens of his own creative output.
Arina Vizitiu
Arina Vizitiu (b. 2001, Bălți, Moldova) is a poet & spoken word performer based in Cluj since 2020, working at the intersection of communication, cultural management & community facilitation. Her practice explores how artistic voices move between stage and digital spaces, investigating hybrid forms of belonging and dialogue.
She is the founder of Decopertat (since 2023), where she has moderated over 50 poetry nights and developed Decopertat Lab, a workshop series dedicated to collaborative learning. In 2024 she co-founded the audio platform AUZIT., where she initiated and hosted the series “Poezii de AUZIT.”, a space for poetic dialogue.
Since 2025, Arina has been part of the Cirkular team, a music production studio, working in communication and gradually expanding into project management, developing processes that connect artists, technical teams & audiences.
With a background in Cultural Management and Entrepreneurship, she has worked across production, communication, and community development in independent contexts and international festivals. Her practice is grounded in attention to human stories and in the belief that art becomes political when it creates safe spaces for listening.
Within TRANZIȚII, she is interested in the inner workings of performance production and in how the role of the producer can support curious and transformative cultural encounters.
Alexandra Măican
My name is Alexandra Măican, I’m 21 years old, and I’m a multidisciplinary communications professional with a focus on culture and design.
I’m drawn to unconventional spaces and am always seeking to understand the discrepancies between appearance and essence. My favorite forms of expression are writing, music, graphic design, and film. For many years, I wanted to be a film director, but circumstances led me toward other career paths. I’m fascinated by anything that emerges through play, and the cornerstones of my creative process are curiosity and memory.
My formal education is in the field of communication and public relations, where I (re)discovered my passion for visual communication. I come from a small town where cultural infrastructure wasn’t a priority for a long time. The last three years I’ve spent in Cluj-Napoca have drawn me into the cultural pulse of this dynamic city. I’ve been active in cultural hubs such as Cinema ARTA (in the areas of communication and logistics), as well as at major film and music festivals like TIFF, Jazz in the Park, and Untold. This wealth of experience has shown me that cultural expression has many dimensions, each of which is fundamental to the whole.
Civic engagement has been and will always remain a vital pillar of my development. I am actively involved in feminist, sustainability, and educational causes, because I see inequality of opportunity as a major obstacle to collective development. I don’t think I’ll ever change the world in some grand way, but I’d like to leave it a little better than it was yesterday.
Kriszta Kedves
Kedves Kriszta, drama educator, instructor, and independent artist; she is one of the founding members of the independent theater company UTP (Untitled Theater Project). She completed her undergraduate studies in theater studies at the Faculty of Theater and Film at Babes-Bolyai University, and during her master’s studies, her interest in anthropology led her to pursue a degree at the Hungarian Institute of Ethnography and Anthropology. In her research, she first examined the impact of COVID-19 on the Hungarian theater scene, and then explored the same topic from the perspective of contemporary dance. She is currently a second-year doctoral student at the Doctoral School of Theater and Film at Babeș-Bolyai University, where she is investigating the potential connection between theater education and sex education; she also serves as a part-time lecturer there. She regularly publishes in professional journals, contributing reviews, critiques, and scholarly articles.
She believes in the educational power of theater (and the arts), in the approach of critical pedagogy, and in the power of attentiveness, care, kindness, and empathy. She enjoys photography as a hobby and is happy to say that she now truly has a real hobby.
Éva Kerekes-Máthé
My name is Éva Kerekes-Máthé. I am 19 years old and a first-year student in the Faculty of Letters at Babeș-Bolyai University. Ever since I was very young, I have been an enthusiastic consumer—and sometimes a practitioner—of nearly every branch of the arts. I’ve tried my hand at painting, photography, and literature, and now I’ll have the opportunity to explore the worlds of theater and cultural management as well.
I grew up in Târgu Mureș, where I served as editor-in-chief of the school newspaper at the Farkas Bolyai Theoretical High School for two years. I was an active member of both the school’s (Bolyai Student Association) and the national (Association of Hungarian High School Students in Romania) student council working groups, so I also have experience in event planning.
My greatest source of pride, however, is perhaps the Tamér Cultural Circle, which I co-founded with a few of my high school classmates and helped run all the way through our graduation. Our repertoire ranged from going to the theater together to hosting literary evenings, but above all, our goal was to present and discuss the cultural world around us in an accessible and student-friendly way.
MIhai Cornea
Composer, sound designer, and Ph.D. candidate at BBU (studying AI and musical composition for theater), with practical experience in technical direction and a rich background in theater and film music. I am passionate about production, cultural management, and coordinating and collaborating within project teams.
Cazan Rebeca Greta
Rebeca Greta Cazan is currently a master’s student in Cultural Management and Entrepreneurship at the Faculty of Theater and Film, UBB. She is passionate about theater, dance, and film.
Prior to that, she completed her degree in Film Studies, also in Cluj, where she learned to “break down” films into their constituent parts and understand what lies behind a good screenplay or an image that evokes emotion. After three years of solitary work in front of her laptop, immersed in her own ideas and thoughts, she felt she wanted more. She wanted to understand how ideas come to life in reality, from the initial sketch to the stage or the screen. That’s how she ended up in cultural management.
Ioana Țurcan
Ioana Țurcan experiments with various artistic and community-based processes, organizing exhibitions and local initiatives on themes related to the environment, uncertain loss, mourning, and care.
When she isn’t making films, she tends to an orchard.
Judas
Multidisciplinary emerging artist, drag performer, person of trans experience who militates for the abolition of genders. Fresh graduate of the graphics BA programme in Cluj, his work for the past year documents gender based violence as a creative force of its own language both in cisheteronormative spaces and queer communities. Trying to connect bits of the oppressive (familial) past to the current liberating acts that the marginalized bodies can find by simply existing, his mediums evolve around installations with photography or distorted video recordings, drawing, printmaking and performance.
In drag, he presents an androginous figure, teaching audiences what healthy seductive masculinity should look like. His persona grew organically over time in parallel with his medical transition and curiosity for exchanging energies with audiences, going back to the concept of body movements as pure queer language, learning from icons of the underground POC (Person of Color) communities.
As future practice, he works towards bringing drag performances closer to conceptual written performance texts in order to find out where the entertainer and the installation artist and researcher meet. He wants to learn more about building spaces, sound and atmosphere for performances to happen, and also learn how to professionaly make body modifications like latex prosthetics to incorporate in the concepts he currently explores.
Diana Dragu
Diana Dragu is an interdisciplinary artist who completed her undergraduate and master’s degrees in Choreography at UNATC. She received an Erasmus+ scholarship to study in Bologna, Italy, where she spent a year exploring the complexities of the performer’s craft and was part of the first cohort to complete the “Academy of Dance and Performance” educational program initiated by the National Dance Center. Diana has traveled extensively in the West to participate in workshops led by international choreographers such as Rob Hayden, David Zambrano, Horacio Macuacua, Laura Aris, Jos Baker, Rainer Behr, and many others. Her works include “RECAP.” (2023) and “NOLand” (2025)—which won the award for Best Dance Performance at the Undercloud Festival.
Diana is an observer of the world around us, and all her creations stem from a personal interest and address universal themes: silencing, manipulation, fear, time, and space. Through her performances, she aims to create a sensory and visceral experience that leaves you no time to think, but only to feel.
Roxana Țentea
She is a cultural manager, playwright, and community facilitator.
She writes manifesto texts and poems. Her practice lies at the intersection of text, cultural intervention, and gathering in underutilized spaces.
She would like to be a teacher at a conceptual school, but until then she is experimenting with tont.in.ă, a DIY project aimed at bringing together (people, things, ideas, and vulnerabilities).
Alexandra Ispas
Alexandra Ispas (b. 2003, Bucharest) is a student in the theater directing program at the “I. L. Caragiale” National University of Theater and Cinematography in Bucharest. She believes that theater and art, in general, arise from the encounter between people and the clash of their worlds, and she is interested in how various forms of artistic expression can merge to create a total art.
In his projects, she explores themes related to the idea of the individual’s place in society, questioning how the social factors with which each person is born (language, environment, or social status) influence the way they perceive the world around them. She believes that art is political and that the artist has a duty to embrace this responsibility when creating.
During his college years, he had the opportunity to participate in numerous relevant artistic training events, ranging from theater workshops organized by Eugenio Barba and his troupe at Odin Teatret, to workshops on the theater of the absurd led by Szabo K. Istvan, to various theater festivals, such as the Avignon International Theater Festival. As a result, she has created a wide variety of installations, performances, and classical theater exercises, ranging from a parade on stilts as part of the Fringe section of the Craiova International Shakespeare Festival to a collective installation titled “Brain Bloom” as part of the /ZAC@Malmaison 2026 project.
Her art is influenced by encounters—whether in person or through books—with established artists and directors such as Eugenio Barba, Arianne Mnouchkine, and Augusto Boal, whose methods he has adapted to develop his own personal approach. The results of her theoretical research to date are reflected in her most recent production, “Biedermann and the Arsonists,” a play created as part of her bachelor’s degree in directing at U.N.A.T.C., in which she sets out to analyze the clash between different theatrical and artistic languages and the ways in which they can interact.
Irina Caraulă
I’m Alaska when I’m directing, Irina when I make a mistake, and Elena when I look in the mirror. I view the outside world through a pair of broken glasses, and that gives me the impression of being split in two. Or of escaping. Or of an illusion.
I earned my bachelor’s degree in theater directing from Babeș-Bolyai University, where I developed my artistic preferences and interests. Most of the time, I remain anchored in the materiality of space. I’m interested in the intersection between set design and directing. I seek to understand how the architecture of the stage can support the actor, how it constrains them to unleash their emotion, how it shapes their presence, and how it ultimately creates a coherent universe.
Although theater is the lens through which I view human nature, my curiosity rejects comfortable limitations. I love to learn continuously, to constantly broaden my horizons, and to seek answers in unexpected places. That is how I came to be studying veterinary medicine today. To some, the leap from directing to the medical sciences seems like a contradiction or an abandonment. To me, it is a natural extension of the same desire to understand life. Both fields require observation, intuition, empathy, and a deep care for vulnerable beings, whether on a theater stage or on an examination table.
This constant need to look beyond boundaries was probably born in Constanța, my hometown. When you grow up with the horizon of the sea before you, you learn that space is never just what you see, but also what you can imagine.
Ara Marta Aur
Ara Marta Aur is currently studying anthropology at the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, with a focus on understanding social dynamics and the ways in which people, nature, and the sociocultural environment coexist and influence one another. For her, artistic practice opens up a way of understanding the world based on experience and sensitivity, and in dialogue with anthropological study—which provides a reflective framework—new tools are revealed through which reality can be observed and explored. Music marked the beginning of her artistic journey, through her study of the piano and flute during her first eight years of school, and later she turned to singing. At the same time, she took theater classes and later turned her interest toward contemporary dance. Each of these practices has contributed to her interest in expressiveness, the body, and movement—not only as forms of but also as means of interaction and communication beyond the limits of verbal language. Nature occupies a central place in her life, serving as both a constant source of inspiration and a refuge.
Her long-standing involvement in numerous community, cultural, and volunteer projects has laid the foundation for her multidisciplinary perspective. For Ara, studying anthropology has changed the way she perceives the world, cultivating her attention to the details and experiences that give meaning to everyday life. This perspective also leaves its mark on her artistic practice, where research and creation come to complement one another.
Adriana Cajvan
Adriana Cajvan (b. 1996) studied Graphic Design and Contemporary Curatorial Practices at the University of Art and Design in Cluj. Her theoretical research focuses on the intersection of humor and art in a political context. She is interested in how ideas materialize and transform the context in which they emerge.
Her practical experience includes internships at alternative art spaces across Europe, such as the Espronceda Institute of Art and Culture (Barcelona) and Hošek Contemporary (Berlin), where she gained experience in production management within interdisciplinary contexts that bring together action art, theater, and visual art.
Locally, she is active in independent artistic spaces such as Reactor de Creație și Experiment and Noncentru. She believes that cultural production demonstrates its quality through its accessibility to the public, without having to sacrifice its own conceptual complexity.