The participants of “¡PROTAGONISTAS!”

Sara A. Abbas works as a scientist and author at the interface of gender and social movements with a focus on Sudan. She is currently involved in a project about the sit-ins created during the December revolution in Sudan. 

Parvin Ardalan is a journalist, activist, and editor of the websites Iranian Feminists Tribune, Zanestan, and Change for equality. She co-founded the Women’s Cultural Center and the One Million Signatures Campaign, a grassroots movement aimed at repealing discriminatory laws against women. For her struggles for women equal rights, she was awarded the Olof Palme Prize in 2007.

Delal Atmaca is the managing director and co-founder of the umbrella organization of migrant women’s organizations (DaMigra eV). She is an expert on topics such as cooperatives, cooperation, diversity, migration, gender and women's rights and lectures on these topics at the federal and European political level.

Simone Dede Ayivi lives in Berlin and works as a journalist, writer and director. Her performances are activist and from a black-feminist perspective. Ayivi is involved in ISD – Initiative Schwarzer Menschen in Deutschland and is on the board of Lause Lebt e.V.

Camille Barbagallo is a Senior Strategist for “Sunrise Project”, working to end fossil fuel finance. She was the COP26 Coalition Coordinator and organises with Women’s Strike Assembly in Britain. Previously she worked as a feminist researcher, her PhD focused on the politics and histories of social reproduction and the neoliberal governance of childcare.

Priya Basil is a writer. She grew up in Kenya, studied in the UK, and now lives in Berlin. She writes regularly for Lettre International and various daily newspapers. Basil is co-founder of the Authors for Peace platform.

Lara Bitar works in Beirut, Lebanon, and is the founding editor of “The Public Source”. Her media practice is founded on a deep sense of place – a geographical imperative – which centers marginalized communities and connects their struggles to broader frameworks.

Lorena Cabnal is a feminist activist and member of the “Network of Ancestral Healers of Community Feminism”. Her work focuses on the impact of forced migration of indigenous women, the defense of indigenous territories in Guatemala and is anchored in the concept of Territorial Community Feminism.

Sandra Bello is a black person, favelada, Quilombola and coordinator of Quilombo Allee in Berlin, and a survivor of colonialism and its mutations. 

Anna Carastathis is a political theorist and co-director of the Feminist Autonomous Centre for research in Athens. She also works as a writer and is co-investigator at TransCity research project.

Casa Kuà is a trans* inter queer community and health center in Kreuzberg, Berlin. 

Carmen Cariño Trujillo is a farmer and sociologist as well as an activist connected to struggles and movements in defense of land and territory. Since 2014, she has been a member of the Latin American Group of Study, Training, and Feminist Action (GLEFAS).

Luci Cavallero is a researcher at the University of Buenos Aires. Her work focuses on the link between debt, illegal capital, and different forms of violence. She is a feminist activist and member of the Ni Una Menos collective.

The “Kurdisches Frauenbüro für Frieden CENÎ e.V.” is an association founded by Kurdish and Turkish women with the aim to strengthen the international solidarity of women for peace processes in Turkey and Kurdistan, in the Middle East and worldwide.

Pau(la) Chaves Bonilla aka “La ChicaScratch”, is an artist and queer organiser from a Colombian dissident family, now living in Amsterdam. She works interdisciplinary and has a background in contemporary dance, choreography, theatre, and circus. 

Chocolate Remix is the reggaeton solo project of producer, rapper, singer and DJ Romina Bernardo from Buenos Aires.

Christina Clemm works as a criminal defense attorney and as a counsel for victims of sexualized and racially motivated violence. She is an expert lawyer for criminal and family law in Berlin and was a member of the expert commission on the reform of sexual criminal law of the BMJV.

DaMigra has been operating as a nationwide, origin-independent and women-specific umbrella organization of migrant women's organizations since 2014. DaMigra is representative of more than 60 migrant women's organizations and campaigns nationwide for their interests in politics, the public sphere, the media and business. It works on equal political, social, professional and cultural participation of migrant women in social life in Germany.

Andrea Dip is an investigative journalist and researcher. She is part of the independent Agência Pública, an investigative journalism agency founded by women*. There, she researches topics such as gender justice, sexualized violence, and the Brazilian prison system.

Dilar Dirik is a political sociologist at the University of Oxford. She is the author of the book “The Kurdish Women’s Movement: History, Theory, Practice” (2022). Her research and teaching focus on forced displacement, state violence, non-state autonomy, women’s struggles, and radical knowledge production.

Ebow (Ebru Düzgün) is a German rapper of Kurdish origin who lives in Vienna.

Firoozeh Farvardin is a postdoc researcher/activist working on gender/sexual (counter) strategies of authoritarian neoliberalism at IRGAC hosted by the MERGE. She is also the affiliated researcher and former guest lecturer at BIM, Humboldt University of Berlin.

Working across nation-state borders, disciplinary boundaries, and institutional barriers, the Athens-based institution Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research (FAC Research) returns to the feminist roots of autonomous knowledge production and questions what counts as legitimate knowledge and who is granted the right to produce and receive it.

Working across nation-state borders, disciplinary boundaries, and institutional barriers, the institution Feminist Autonomous Research Network Greece returns to the feminist roots of autonomous knowledge production and questions what counts as legitimate knowledge and who is granted the right to produce and receive it.

Feminists4Jina is a network of feminist collectives and activists from different cities around the world, with diverse lived and learned experiences and viewpoints, united to echo and reinforce the voice of the “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” revolution of Iran and to strengthen its transnational elements. 

Verónica Gago teaches social sciences at the University of Buenos Aires as well as the Universidad Nacional de San Martín. Her book “Feminist International: How to Change Everything” was published in English in 2020. Gago is part of the publishing collective Tinta Limón and a key player in Ni Una Menos.

María Galindo is one of the cult figures of Latin American feminism. She is active as a journalist, graffiti artist, poet, essayist and film producer. She is co-founder of Mujeres Creando - a women’s shelter and collective that organises feminist struggles alongside solidarity-based care work, and co-director of a radio station in La Paz and El Alto, Bolivia. 

Denise Garcia Bergt is a Brazilian movie director, author, activist, and initiator of the self-organized group “International Women* Space” in Berlin.

Dalia Gebrial is a political economist and writer at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her work addresses questions of technology, capitalism, gender, and race.

Jule Govrin is a political philosopher who conducts research at the intersection of feminist philosophy, political theory, social philosophy, and aesthetics on the political dimension of bodies and desire as a transformative force. 

Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez is a sociologist and professor specializing in culture and migration at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. She is a member of the Research Group on Human Rights Discourses and part of the advisory board of “Mecila”, an international research college focusing on Latin American Studies.

Sabine Hark is a sociologist with a focus on gender studies, feminist epistemology and critique, and queer theory. She teaches as a professor at TU Berlin at the Center for Interdisciplinary Women’s and Gender Studies, which she directs.

Qzeng Productions is a production company and a creative collective based in Berlin. 

Becka Hudson is a doctoral researcher, editor and producer based in London. She researches imprisonment, psychiatric diagnosis, and their histories. As a producer her work has focused on creative campaigns addressing things like housing, incarceration, and youth participation in politics.

The Initiative Schwarzer Menschen in Deutschland Bund e.V. (ISD) is an association of Black people who work for the interests of Black people in Germany. The association wants to promote black awareness, counter racism and support the networking of black people and their organizations.

International Women Space is a feminist, anti-racist group in Berlin with migrant and refugee women and non-migrant women as members. They fight patriarchy and document everyday violence, racism, sexism and all kinds of discrimination.

Nesrine Jelalia is the executive director of Al Bawsala, an independent nonprofit NGO Its goals are the defense of fundamental rights, the establishment of good governance practices, social progress and the empowerment of citizens.

The Academy of Jineolojî strives to develop and promote the field of “Jineolojî”, which emerges from the enduring struggles for liberation within the women's movement in Kurdistan. Starting from 2017, research and educational establishments, including the Jineolojî Faculty at Rojava University, have been established with this objective in mind.

Liad Hussein Kantorowicz is a performance artist, musician, activist, and perpetual migrant from Israel Palestine. Liad advocates for the rights of sex workers and is the founder of a Berlin-based peer project for migrant sex workers at Hydra e.V.

Fatemeh Karimi is sociologist and was engaged in scientific and activist work on female genital mutilation. She also wrote a book about the female guerrilla fighters of the Komalah party in Iranian Kurdistan and leads the Kurdistan Human Rights Network.

Iida Käyhkö is a feminist organiser and a PhD candidate at University of London. Both her organising and academic work are concerned with the gendered aspects of state violence and the criminalisation of social movements.

Aysuda Kölemen is a Turkish lecturer at Bard College Berlin. Her research interests include public opinion and discourses on redistribution, politics of new religiosities, and democratic backsliding. She is currently working on authoritarianization and civil resistance in Turkey. 

LASTESIS is a collective from Valparaíso. Through performative means they address sexualised violence and transfer feminist theories into multimedia formats. With their performance “Un violador en tu camino” (“A rapist on your way”), they gained worldwide attention in 2019.The collaboration with HAU began in 2020.

Agata Lisiak is Professor of Migration Studies and Academic Director of the Internship Program at Bard College Berlin. She works at the intersections of migration studies, urban sociology, and cultural studies and leads a project on transnational feminism, solidarity, and social justice.

Ewa Majewska is a feminist theorist of culture from Poland. Her research focuses on the archive studies, dialectics of the weak, feminist critical theory and antifascism.

Erica Malunguinho da Silva is an artist, educator and activist. She was the first transgender person to be elected to a Brazilian state parliament. Malunguinho founded the urban quilombo Aparelha Luzia, a cultural space for art, discussions and performances on the theme of Black culture.

Zintombizethu (Zethu) Matebeni is a South Africa Research Chair in Sexualities, Genders and Queer Studies at the University of Fort Hare. Matebeni works collaboratively with activists, scholars and artists and creates interdisciplinary scholarly work. She has been visiting professor at the Women’s Gender and Sexualities Studies (WGSS) Department at Yale University (USA).

Maternal Fantasies is an interdisciplinary group of international artists and cultural producers based in Berlin. They shape the discourse on motherhood through collective artistic processes while enhancing the visibility of contemporary feminist positions addressing motherhood(s) in the arts

María do Mar Castro Varela is a political scientist and professor of General Education and Social Work at Alice Salomon University in Berlin. Her research interests focus on Postcolonial Studies, Gender and Queer Studies, Critical Migration Studies, Holocaust Studies and Critical Media Praxis.

Barbara Marcel is an artist and filmmaker. In her works she deals with historical conceptions of nature and their connections to colonial imagery. She has been living in Berlin since 2009 and is currently one of the 12 Berlin Artistic Research Grant Program Fellow 2022-23.

Rub(én) Solís Mecalco is a non-binary indigenous researcher working on the decolonization of Maya sexualities in Southeastern Mexico and post-colonialisms and global citizenship.

Débora Medeiros is a journalist and postdoc researcher for Journalism Studies at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies at FU Berlin. 

medico international e.V. is an aid and human rights organization that campaigns for the unconditional equality of all people worldwide. The focus is on supporting those affected by oppression and war as well as globalized capitalism.

Lina Meruane is a writer from Santiago de Chile. She is the founder of the New York based independent publishing house Brutas Editoras.

Miriam Nobre is an agronomist and lecturer for a programme on Latin American integration at the University of São Paulo. She conducts training and research activities in agroecology, feminist economics, and solidarity economics and was coordinator of the World March of Women 2006–2013.

Camila Nobrega is a journalist and scholar who works on transformations caused by megaprojects of infrastructure, investigating transnational cis-heteropatriarchal systems of power. She works from a feminist decolonial perspective. Nobreg is also the initiator of “Beyond the Green”, a platform for transmedia narratives with a starting point between Brazil and Germany.

Bahar Oghalai is a social scientist with a focus on intersections of racism critique and feminism. She wrote her doctoral thesis on the politicization biographies of diasporic feminists from Iran and Turkey in Germany. In 2023 she published the book "Friendship. Triad of a Political Practice", together with María do Mar Castro Varela.

Marina Otero is a choreographer and dancer from Buenos Aires. She currently lives in Madrid. In her performances she treats her body as an object of research and thus addresses pain, the passing of time, love, death, and violence.

Peira (Berlin/Leipzig/Vienna) develops artistic projects in collaborations. The members of Peira met in 2009 at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen and worked under the name ongoing project (2014 – 2021). Since 2021, the group has been active as Peira.

Somayeh Rostampour is an Iranian specialist in Kurdish feminism and a researcher at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis.

Bafta Sarbo works on the relationship between Marxism and anti-racism. She is politically active, among other things, on the board of the Initiative Black People in Germany, where she works on racial profiling, migration policy and racisms in Germany. With Eleonora Roldán Mendívil, she published the book “The Diversity of Exploitation in Critique of the Prevailing Antiracism” in 2022.

Elif Sarican is a writer, curator, and translator. She has lectured at cultural institutions and universities in Europe and North America on topics such as the Kurdish women`s movement, anthropology, politics and history. She is the author of the anthology “She Who Struggles: Revolutionary Women Who Shaped The World” and host of the Pomegranate Podcast.

Evren Savcı is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She also publishes on language, queer theory, sexual politics, neoliberalism, and religion, with a focus on Turkey and West Asia.

Jamile da Silva e Silva is a black feminist, Brazilian and mother of two. As a director of S.U.S.I. Interkulturelles Frauenzentrum, she focuses on intersectional feminism, the anti-racist and decolonial struggle, visibility and empowerment of marginalized groups with a focus on migrant and refugee women.

S.U.S.I. Interkulturelles Frauenzentrum stands for solidarisch, unabhängig, sozial und international (Solidary, Independent, Social and International) and is the name of an intercultural women’s center whose offers consist of education, culture and advice for women. 

TranStyX is a Tunisian queer art project . It was founded in 2018 by Moncef Zahrouni and Zeyneb Farhat and aims to increase the visibility of the local queer community, with a focus on trans people.

Myrto Tsilimpounidi is a social researcher, photographer, and co-director of the Feminist Autonomous Centre for research in Athens. Their research focuses on the interface between urbanism, culture, and innovative methodologies.

Tzoa is a gender-non-conforming transmasc* of color. Ta is a Traditional Chinese and Daoist Medicine practitioner, a community organizer and part of Casa Kuà. 

Nazan Üstündağ is a sociologist and has taught at Boğaziçi University. She holds a doctorate from Indiana University. She is one of the founders of Peace Assembly, Women for Peace Initiative and Academics for Peace and works on the Kurdish women's movement, bodies and abolitionist feminism. 

Louise Wagner is a sociologist and environmental activist at Ende Gelände, raising awareness of the colonial continuities in the current gas expansion. As part of the Debt for Climate campaign, she calls for debt relief to finance equitable transformation in the Global South.

Galina Yarmanova is a researcher and educator from Kyiv, Ukraine, now based in Germany. She specializes on Gender in Middle and East Europe as well as on sexuality and nationalism, anti-gender right wing, queer kinship and sexuality and state politics in the late Soviet Union. 

Himmat Zoubi is a Palestinian researcher, PhD sociologist, and feminist activist. Her work focuses on cities in a colonial context and she has published texts on settler colonial urbanity, memory and oral history, gender, indigenous knowledge, and resistance.