Mirosław Kocur, theater director and anthropologist, currently holds the position of Professor at the University of Wrocław (UWr) and the Stanisław Wyspiański Academy of Theatre Arts. He served as the Chair of Cultural Studies at UWr from 2014 to 2020 and was appointed the Artistic Director of the International Theatre Festival “Dialog–Wrocław” in 2023.
In the 1970s, Kocur actively participated in Jerzy Grotowski’s paratheatrical projects and his Theatre of Sources. After graduating in theatre directing in 1984, he was appointed the Artistic Director of the Second Studio of Wrocław, a company established in place of Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre. His expertise was recognized with two Fulbright grants in the United States (1990-1994 and 2005). After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he organized the “Broken Walls” Festival of Eastern European Drama in California (1991).
From the very start of his theatrical career, Mirosław Kocur has combined artistic practice with scholarly research. This interdisciplinary approach was already evident in his 1986 production of Prometheus by Aeschylus, based on his translation from ancient Greek, and in his 1989 staging of Elijah by Martin Buber, translated by Kocur from German and performed in multiple languages simultaneously, including Sanskrit.
His leading scholarly publications in English include Staropolska: Theatres of Identity (2022), The Power of Theater: Actors and Spectators in Ancient Rome (2018), The Second Birth of Theatre: Performances of Anglo-Saxon Monks (2017), and On the Origins of Theater (2016). As the chief editor of the series “Interdisciplinary Studies in Performance” at Peter Lang, he continues to explore the intersections of art and science.
