Ira Brand

Ira is an artist, writer, performance-maker, and curator. She graduated from Dartington College of Arts in 2007, and in 2019 completed the DAS Theatre Masters in Amsterdam, where she is now based. She makes live, inter-disciplinary performances: solo stage shows, one-to-one pieces, duets, or participatory work. Her process is one of using personal starting points to speak to wider social, political, and formal concerns. A current thematic preoccupation is power and how it is felt and enacted – specifically through language, gender and desire. The relationship with the audience is a core material of all her work, and she makes use of text, video, auto/biography, found material, research and interview processes, and physical practices. She has an interest in achieving particular states in the body, in the looseness and explicitness brought on by exhaustion or obstacle or a lack of control.

Ira’s work has been presented across the UK and internationally, including at Malavoadora Porto, Matadero Madrid, Kanagawa Arts Theatre Yokohama, Hessisches Landestheater Marburg, Studiobühne Köln, Frascati Amsterdam, Monty Kultuurfaktorij Antwerp, The Basement Auckland, and Abrons Arts Centre New York. She is also one of the Co-Directors of Forest Fringe, an award-winning artist-led collective with whom she has delivered projects as an artist and curator in Edinburgh, London, Hong Kong, Auckland, Lisbon, Kanazawa, and Salvador da Bahia.