Olympia Bukkakis

Biography

Olympia Bukkakis, Queen of Heaven and Earth, Empress of Despair, and Architect of Your Eternal Suffering, began performing while completing a BA in Social Theory at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and kickstarted the local alternative drag scene with her party series “Pandora’s Box.” Her collaboration with the queer Australian theater group Sisters Grimm led to projects such as “Summertime in the Garden of Eden.” Since moving to Berlin in 2012, she has organized, curated, and hosted various queer performance evenings such as “Get Fucked,” “Fancy,” and “Apocalypse Tonight,” and in 2015 launched “Queens Against Borders,” a solidarity performance series for trans and queer refugees. In recent years she has also performed in contemporary dance and theater, in pieces such as Jeremy Wade’s “Between Sirens” and “Human Resources.” In 2019, she graduated from the Master’s program in Solo/ Dance/Authorship at the Inter-University Centre for Dance (HZT) Berlin with the production “Tales from a State of Shemergency.” Together with Isabel Gatzke she wrote the performative manifesto “Work on Progress,” which was presented at HAU as part of the festival “The Future is Not Enough.” In addition to her work as a performer and presenter, Olympia gives workshops and writes. Her text “Gender Euphoria: Trans and Nonbinary Identities in Drag” was published in the anthology “Contemporary Drag Practices and Performers: Drag in a Changing Scene”, (Bloomsbury, 2020); her polemic “A Case for the Abolition of Men” in “Counter Readings of the Body” (HKW/Spector Books, 2020). Her work engages with, and is informed by, tensions at the intersections of queer nightlife and the contemporary dance and performance scene.