May Abdalla is an immersive experience creator and co-founder of Anagram, an award-winning studio making experiences that uses physical interaction and recently available technologies to bring people intimately into a story. Her work explores a range of contemporary issues from surveillance to power, fake news to our relationship with mental health. Her latest project The Collider combining immersive theatre and virtual reality, premiered at Tribeca and received Best Immersive Art Award at Sandbox Festival in China.

Theatre, opera and film director, deputy artistic director of TR Warszawa. A graduate of the Faculty of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University and the Directing Department of the Ludwik Solski State Drama School in Kraków. He made his debut with 'The Tropical Craze' (prod. Teatr Rozmaitości, 1997). Director of many theatrical performances, such as: 'Magnetism of the Heart' (prod. Teatr Rozmaitości, 1999), 'Doctor Faustus' (coprod. Polski Theatre in Wrocław, Hebbel-Theatre in Berlin, project THEOREM, 1999), 'Prince Myshkin' (prod. Teatr Rozmaitości, 2000), 'Unidentified Human Remains' (prod. Teatr Dramatyczny in Warsaw, 1998), '4.48 Psychosis' (coprod. Teatr Rozmaitości and Teatr Polski in Poznań, 2005), 'No Matter How Hard We Tried' (coprod. TR Warszawa and Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin, 2009), ‘2007: 'Macbeth' (prod. TR Warszawa, 2005), 'T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T' (prod. TR Warszawa, 2009), 'Other Woman’ (prod. TR Warszawa, 2014), 'Martyrs' (prod. TR Warszawa, 2015). Grzegorz Jarzyna has also been directing opera performances, such as: 'The Gambler' (prod. Opera de Lyon, 2009), 'The Child and the Spells' (prod. Bavarian State Opera), 'The Dwarf' (prod. Bavarian State Opera, 2011) or ‘Giovanni’ (prod. 2006). His performances have been repeatedly presented at festivals and theatres around the world, including in Avignon, Edinburgh, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Jerusalem, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Stockholm, London, Dublin, Astana, Bucharest, New York, Toronto, Los Angeles, Wellington, Beijing and Hong Kong.

In 2015, the premiere of Grzegorz Jarzyna's film 'No Matter How Hard We Tried' took place, co-produced by TR Warszawa and the National Audiovisual Institute. The film was presented at many film festivals and at special screenings in Poland and abroad.
Among the latest performances and projects of Grzegorz Jarzyna are ‘Other People' – big participatory project carried out by artistic collective (prod. TR Warszawa, 2019), 'Two Swords' (produced by Beijing Propel Performing Arts & Media Co., Ltd. Shanghai Theatre Academy, TR Warszawa, 2018), ‘G.E.N.' (TR Warszawa, 2017), and 'G.E.N. VR', the world's first Cinematic VR with audience participation (prod. TR Warszawa, Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Mimo.ooo VR, 2018). This production, unique on a global scale, was shown at the international Performing Arts Meeting TPAM 2018 in Yokohama and at the 2018 Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance in New York.
Grzegorz Jarzyna is a laureate of many awards and distinctions, including awards of the Minister of Foreign Affairs for outstanding services to Poland in the world (2002), Golden Order for the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg (2004), Polityka's Passport in the theatre category for 1998, Laur Konrad (1999), Prize of Konrad Swinarski for the best director (1999, 2009), the prize of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage (2010), a special prize for the lifetime achievement of the 15th Comedy Festival - festCO in Bucharest (2018). In 2007, for the performance 'Medea' realized in 2006 at the Burgtheatre in Vienna, he received NESTROY-Preis - one of the most prestigious theatre awards of the German-speaking area.

Since 1998 he has been the deputy artistic director of TR Warszawa (former Teatr Rozmaitości), from 2006 to 2012 he was the Executive Director of the theatre. He is the creator of the artistic profile and the leader of the TR Warszawa team. During more than 20 years of theatre management, he has built its brand and high position in the national and global artistic circulation. Under his supervision, TR Warszawa has become a place of artistic experiments and creative development.

May Abdalla, from award-winning studio Anagram discusses the use of the memories of your audience in interactive experience design. And reveals the power of losing rather than finding your memories in a work of theatre.

You will be taken through some of the creation process for The Collider- an immersive theatre piece using VR to explore power dynamics selected for Best of VR category at Venice Film Festival to reveal the challenges in asking for personal honesty in an interactive setting.

Also introducing their new project Goliath which sets out to look at lapses of reality on an experience that challenges our preconceptions about psychosis.

Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski (collectively known as Clyde Henry Productions) are Academy Award®-nominated directors and animators. Their film Madame Tutli-Putli (2007, NFB) won multiple awards at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Best Animated Short Oscar. They went on to adapt Maurice Sendak’s children’s book Higglety Pigglety Pop! and direct Meryl Streep in the film, which was co-produced by Spike Jonze, Vincent Landay, and the NFB’s Marcy Page in 2010. Lavis and Szczerbowski were also recognized with a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Achievement in Art Direction for their work on Guy Maddin’s 2015 feature, The Forbidden Room, co-produced by the NFB.

Assistant professor in the English Department at the Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, where he specialises in contemporary British drama. He is a theatre critic writing for major Polish theatre journals and co-author of the blog Jawne Sny, which discusses questions of video games and their relationship to other branches of culture. He has written on games for publications including Przekrój, dwutygodnik.com and PIXELMagazine.