Yuichi Kinoshita
Director of Kinoshita Kabuki. Born in 1985 in Wakayama City. In 2006, he founded Kinoshita Kabuki, where he adapts and supervises performances of classical plays.
He also earned a PhD in Arts in 2015. He received the Newcomer Award at the 28th Agency for Cultural Affairs Arts Festival and the 38th Kyoto Prefecture Cultural Encouragement Award (2019).
In addition to his stage work, he is active across multiple fields, including serving as a regular personality on NHK Radio 2’s “A Friendly Talk on Japanese Classics”. Since 2024, he has served as Head of the Artistic Directors’ Collective at Matsumoto Performing Arts Centre. His publications include “Traveling to the Origins of Kabuki Where Stories Are Born” (Tankosha).

Hannah Schünemann
Hannah Schünemann is a dramaturge and literary and theatre scholar. From the 2025/26 season onwards, she took over as head of dramaturgy at the Schauspielhaus Zürich. She studied general and comparative literature, philosophy and theatre studies in Munich, Paris and Berlin. As a dramaturge she worked at the Volksbühne Berlin. She has also worked for the Berliner Festspiele, the Münchner Kammerspiele, among others.

She completed her doctorate on radical languages of form in contemporary theatre. In 2023, she was invited as a visiting scholar to the PhD Programme for Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Centre of City University New York.Her dissertation «Ultrawelten. Radikale Formsprachen in den Inszenierungen von Susanne Kennedy, Lucia Bihler und Florentina Holzinger» (Ultraworlds. Radical Languages of Form in the Productions of Susanne Kennedy, Lucia Bihler and Florentina Holzinger) was published in August 2025 by Theater der Zeit.

Helena Eckert
Helena Eckert is a dramaturge and performing arts curator. She will join the new artistic team at the Volksbühne in Berlin under the direction of Matthias Lilienthal. Previously, she worked as an in-house dramaturge at the Schauspielhaus Zürich in Switzerland and at the Münchner Kammerspiele in Germany. She has also worked as a freelance dramaturge across disciplines, including theatre, visual arts, and documentary film. She works closely with directors Susanne Kennedy and Leonie Böhm.
She studied philosophy at the University of Hildesheim and at UFPA in Belém do Pará, Brazil, as well as Critical Studies (MA) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria. She earned a degree in Visual Anthropology from Goldsmiths, University of London, where her research focused on multigenerational memory, nationalism, and the aesthetics of nature.

Yoko Kawasaki
After working at CAN Inc. and Kyoto Art Center, she was a fellow for the Program of Overseas Study by the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan and studied at HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin. She has been involved as production coordinator at Kyoto Experiment since 2011 and is co-director since 2020. In 2024 she received the 74th Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s Art Encouragement Prize for New Artists (development of the arts).

Hashimoto Yusuke
Yusuke Hashimoto was born in Fukuoka, Japan 1976 and studied aesthetics and art theory at the Kyoto University. He joined Berliner Festspiele which is a cultural institution belonging to the German Federal Government as the Head of Dramaturgy since 2022 and was appointed to the Artistic Director of Performing Arts Season of Berliner Festspiele since 2023. He founded Kyoto Experiment in 2010 and led the festival as the artistic director until 2019. Since 2014 he had worked at ROHM Theatre Kyoto, the municipal theatre of Kyoto city as the programme director until 2022.

He published a book Supporting the Arts -The Ecology of American Cultural Policies (2023), based on his research on the funding system of performing arts in United States.

Akira Takayama
Akira Takayama formed the creative collective Port B in 2002. He produces a wide range of artworks and projects that include tour-style performances, video installations, social experiments, discussions, and sightseeing tours. In 2013, he founded Port Urban Research Center, which applies theatrical methods to tourism, urban planning, social practices, and media development, among other activities.