Maryam Palizban

Theater scholar, author, actress and director. She received her PhD in 2014 from the FU and the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL) on “Figurationen des Märtyrers” (Figurations of the Martyr)". For  Palizban, interdisciplinarity in relation to "religion and culture" has been a key element of her research since her dissertation at the Department of Theater Studies at Freie Universität and her first academic research projects at the Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin (Zfl). From the very beginning of her work as a theatre scholar, her innovative research approach on the relationship between religion -especially Islam- with culture, theatre, and text has led her to explore topics such as "Figurations of the Martyr in Middle Eastern and European Culture," and "The Theatrical Space of Faith. The areas of tension between "Religion and Art," "Cultural Theory of Modern Islam," and "Performativity and Textuality" are among the central themes of her multilingual publication, lectures, and teaching. In her native Iran, she has become known as a film actress through films such as Deep Breath (Cannes International Film Festival, 2003), Fat Shaker (Tiger award, Rotterdam film festival 20013) and LANTOURI (Berlinale, 2016), and as a poet. She has received various awards, including Best Leading Actress for Deep Breath by the Iranian Film Academy.  She was a fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg at the Ruhr University in Bochum, and recently at Schloss Wiepersdorf. Her dissertation, "Performativität des Mordes“ (Performativity of Murder) was published by Kadmos Verlag in 2017. She has lived in Berlin since 2005 and works as a scholar and artist in Berlin and Tehran (till recently). Since April 1, 2021, she has been a fellow at the Center for Islamic Theology at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster and organized interdisciplinary colloquium series on the topic “Body and corporeality” and “Woman, Body and Revolution” and thus present the Center for Islamic Theology as an innovative discussion space. Her most recent publication, “Understanding and forgetting the body Interdisciplinary approaches”, deals in an interdisciplinary way with the question of the corporeality of the human being.