Bio

Eva Neklyaeva is a curator based in Santarcangelo di Romagna. Eva is concerned with the questions of freedom and focuses her practice on exploring these questions across performing art, politics and sexuality.
At the moment, she is working as an artistic director towards her third edition of Santarcangelo Festival. Founded in 1971, Santarcangelo is the oldest Italian festival dedicated to the contemporary performing arts, presenting and producing an immersive, loud, radically anti-disciplinary program in a small town between the hills and the sea. The summer nights here are dark and very, very hot.
Her previous positions included Director of a contemporary art organization Checkpoint Helsinki, a new institution with a passion for finding new ways of producing, presenting and communicating art for the city and its residents. Before that, she had been running Baltic Circle International Contemporary Theatre Festival for six years. Under her leadership, the festival became an acclaimed international platform and laboratory for emerging multidisciplinary performance. In 2014, Neklyaeva has founded Wonderlust – a festival of diverse and creative sexuality that takes place every June in Helsinki.
For her work, Neklyaeva received two TINFO awards for innovation in theatre field, Finnish PEN’s Freedom of Speech award as well as Finnish Sexologists Association’s award for promotion of sexual wellbeing. The current challenge is to find some kind of balance in the wild mix of personal, political and professional.