CreativeMornings/Bucharest

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Vlad Ilicevici is the managing director of Animest IAFF and the founder of the Animation Worksheep, an eductional platform connected to the festival.

Worksheep is definitely his most accomplishing project so far. Among the 90 former worksheepers, more than 60 work now as animators or in animation related areas. With the help of trainers, partners and collaborators of the Animation Worksheep and also with the help of worksheepers themselves, Vlad is trying to create a solid animation community in Romania.

Bachelor and doctor in psychology from the University of Bucharest, Vintilă Mihăilescu is actually professor of anthropology at the National School of Political Studies and Administration in Bucharest, and vice-dead of the Faculty of Political Studies. He has conducted personal and collective fieldworks in rural and urban settings in Romania for about 40 years, and has been involved as project manager in many national and international research projects. Mihăilescu founded the Romanian Society of Cultural Anthropology in 1990, was director of the Museum of the Romanian Peasant between 2005 and 2010, and a visiting professor in different universities from France, Italy, Canada, Belgium, Suisse and Germany. He is also a columnist with Dilema Veche since 1998, where he recently proposed an approach of “public anthropology”. His main fields of interest are rural and urban community studies, material culture and theoretical anthropology. 

”Miloš Jovanović is my name and I am a designer/ publisher/ inventor/ futurist/ anxious/ biker/ gamer/ dj/ writer/ lost-with-ducks-who-came-from-the-trucks/ hacker/ shitty-basketball-player/ fixer/ samizdat/ gadjo/ activist/ no-style/ misfit/ shadow/ fame-without-fame/ lazy/ fontaddict/ autodidact/ smoker/ neue/ miculparizer/ pioneer and father.

Mădălina Marcu is a strategic philanthropy adviser.

Cristian Neagoe (1984, Bucharest) studied Philosophy at the University of Bucharest, specializing in Applied Ethics and European Studies. He has worked as a librarian, PR, publisher, curator, producer and event organizer in Bucharest and New York for organizations such as Cărtureşti, Romanian Cultural Institute, British Council, Goethe Institut. He is the founder and organizer of Street Delivery and Train Delivery, the most popular festivals for public space and urban experiments in Romania. He has written about art, activism and ethics in magazines in Romania and abroad, including Dilema Veche, Suplimentul pentru Cultură, Decât o Revistă, Liternet, Șapte Seri, Playboy, FHM, TABU, Republik, Omagiu, Hardcomics, Aooleu, Țâțe și Ţaţe, Umelec (Czech Republic), Circostrada (France).

In 2008 he organized in New York one of the most discussed and controversial Romanian exhibitions of the last decade, Freedom for Lazy People, which invited street artists from Romania to represent the New York realities through a local underground filter, and exhibited a work that will become emblematic for the conflict between traditionalist and contemporary Romanian art: the Pink Pony.

He was the senior editor of the weekly Șapte Seri for three years. He has translated into Romanian the works of Art Spiegelman (Maus), John Kennedy Toole (The Neon Bible), John Pinder (The European Union), Patrick Marber (Closer), poems and short stories by Charles Bukowski for Polirom, ALL and ART. He is performer and PR of The Institute of Change, a contemporary dance performance produced by the National Dance Center of Bucharest. 

Photo credits: First - Cosmin Bumbut; Second - Viviana Ball; Third - Anya Dimitrov.

Doru Trăscău is a Bucharest born self thought musician, motorcycle addict, and father of two. He started playing guitar at 17 and didn’t stop ever since. 2000 marks the year of his debut band, AB4. Toxic, the band’s first release, tops the charts and the band establishes a name very fast. With the very same band Doru wins the M.T.V. European Awards - Best Local Act - in 2003. In 2008, AB4 stops its activity and Doru starts a new project: The Mono Jacks. The new formed band quickly makes an impression and becomes a reference for the local indie scene.

Doru is actively working as a graphic designer. For the last 7 years he has been an interface designer for FIFA, the EA Sports very famous game.

Photo credits: First - Petrică Tănase; Second - Svetlana Cârstean

Iulian Tănase was born on 3 September 1973 in Moinești, Bacău. He graduated from the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies in 1999, and from the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Bucharest in 2010. He was an editor for the satirical magazines Academia Cațavencu (1997-2010) and Kamikaze (2010-2011). A radio producer at Radio Guerrilla since 2004, he is currently hosting a weekend morning show entitled Războiul Sfîrșitului Săptămînii (The War of the End of the Week).

He is a creative writing teacher and storytelling trainer for children and adults.

Among the volumes published in Romania: Îngerotica [Angelo-erotica] (1999), Poeme pentru orice eventualitate [Poems Just in Case] (2000), Iubitafizica [Loverphysics] (2002, 2003, 2013), Sora exactă [The Precise Sister] (2003), Ochiul exploziv [The Explosive Eye] (2006), Trusa instalatorului de umbre [The Shadow Plumber’s Toolbox] (2006, together with Dan Stanciu), Abisa [Abyssa] (2007, 2016), Adora (2009), Cucamonga (2011), Oase migratoare [Migratory Bones] (2011), Manualul Îmblînzitorului de Cafele [The Coffee Whisperer’s Handbook] (2013), Teoria tăcerii [The Theory of Silence] (2015), Experimentul MAMATATA [The MUMANDDAD Experiment](2015).

He has published the following abroad: Balkanische Alphabete (together with Constantin Acosmei and Vasile Leac), translations by: Sabine Küchler, Hans Till and Ernest Wichner, Wunderhorn, Heidelberg (2009), Aimétaphysique (la science des amours imaginaires), translated by Valentina Butoescu, Éditions Le Coudrier, Belgia (2010), La Demonadologio, translated into Esperanto by Ionel Oneț, Eldonejo Bero, Rotterdam (2013).

He was the coordinator of the collective volume Pentru Gellu Naum / For Gellu Naum, Editura Vinea/ICARE, 2002. He coordinates the publication Athanor. Caietele Fundaţiei Gellu Naum with Dan Stanciu and Sebastian Reichmann.

He has participated at the International Writers Workshop, Hong Kong (2008) as a visiting writer and at the London International Festival of Surrealism (2007, 2008) with various works. His texts are published in reviews and anthologies in Romania, Germany, Austria, UK, the United States, Hong Kong, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and France. He has given public readings in China, Hong Kong, Germany, Austria, Italy, Slovenia and Romania.

First photo by Radu Afrim. Second photo by Angelique Surrel.

Gianina Cărbunariu – theatre director. Among recent performances: Vorbiți Tăcere?/ Sprechen Sie Schweigen?, Oameni obișnuiți and Solitaritate at the Radu Stanca National Theatre in Sibiu, Artists Talk, producer Arcub, co-producer of Piese Refractare, De vînzare/For Sale and Tipografic Majuscul at the Odeon Theatre, X mm din Y km at Fabrica de Pensule in Cluj – producted by Colectiv A, and Sold Out at the Kammerspiele Theatre in Munchen. In 2014, she was invited with the Solitaritate performance in the official selection of the Avignon Festival, and in 2016, she was again present in the festival selection as the playwright of the Tigern performance produced by the Swedish company Jupither Josephsson. In 2015, De Vînzare/For Sale performance has received the UNITER award for the best performance of the year. Artists Talk is nominated at UNITER in the Best Performance of the Year in 2016 category.

Other participations at international festivals: The International Liège Festival, New Plays From Europe Wiesbaden Biennale, Wiener Festwochen, Festival TransAmériques in Montreal, International Theatre Festival Dialog-Wroclaw, International Theatre Festival Kontakt in Torun, Konfrontacje Festival in Lublin, Divadelná Nitra Festival in Slovakia, LIFT Londra, New Drama in Budapest, Mladi Levi in Ljubljana, New Drama in Moscow etc.

Adi Bulboacă was born in the summer of 1988 and sixteen years later he started taking photos. In all the cities he goes, he always knows where to find two things - the theater and the train stations. 

He seeks to capture the patina in all the environments he interacts with, because he believes that the goal of photography is that of encapsulating time. ”Time passes over objects, and it's the more or less subtle trail it leaves behind that interests me with every frame.”

Constantin Vică is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and researcher at the Research Centre in Applied Ethics, University of Bucharest. His main fields of interest are computer and information ethics, roboethics, philosophy of computer science, social and political philosophy, and the critique of intellectual property. 

Paul Breazu is a Romanian journalist, with an experience of over a decade in the area of lifestyle magazines. In parallel, he collaborated with cultural magazines such as REPUBLIK, Sunete and Dilema Veche, writing articles on music and pop culture. 

Currently he is involved in projects dealing with the archeology of Romanian pop music (Batiscaf Radio, Discotecă) and the cultural, social and political condition of the music belonging to/produced in marginal/marginalised communities (PARADAIZ). He is also a DJ—under the alias Rekabu—and writes a regular column on music in Dilema Veche magazine.

Discotecă

Batiscaf Radio

Sorina Vazelina (b. 1986) is a sort of illustrator, cartoonist and graphic designer, with pretzels for brains. Over the past ten years she has been dabbling in a variety of techniques, ranging from vector graphics and collage, to etching and screen printing. She graduated with a BA in Graphic Design from the Arts Faculty in Timișoara and received an MA in Graphic Arts from the National Arts University of Bucharest. Synopsis Media and It's Everyday are two of the visual communication studios that moulded the creature that today goes by the pseudonym Vazelina.

Having collaborated with the likes of Esquire magazine Romania, Playboy, Omagiu,Tataia, Regard Revue, Vice and Scena9, Sorina developed a distinct chameleonic approach to editorial illustration. She has been publishing her own booklets and zines for a while now, and alongside Primitiv Print's screen printer Grigore, they have developed a collection of bizarre posters and trinkets.

By Elena Văduva.

Oana Șandru wears purple sneakers. “Well, they are somewhat purple.” She is from Reșița, a ”shrinking city”, as she calls it, where everyone knows everyone and where you can’t make a move without other people noticing it. In Bucharest, Oana is creative and designs bags.  

From basketball, a sport she thought she was good at but realized that her teacher didn’t really know the rules of, to chemistry, which she loved and dreamed of pursuing, Oana decided to become a copywriter. She wanted to use her love for poetry in creative projects, so she applied to SNSPA in Bucharest. A lot of her friends went to Timișoara, a city much closer to Reșița, so Oana felt really alone in Bucharest, where she found herself surrounded by unknown people and buildings.

In the second year of college, things changed. She got an internship at Mercury360, an advertising agency where she currently works. She remembers the internship very well. She didn’t know how to use Adobe Illustrator, so she downloaded it the night before the final meeting. Her task was to create an advertising campaign for a real client, a brand of memory pills. She managed to finish the project by using a casino table for her advertising poster. She wrote: ”How many cards can you remember?”, a clear reference to the movie (and game) 21. She never imagined that her project was going to open the door to a career as a copywriter.

When she was 16, Oana decided it was time for her to create something special. One of her friends was already making bracelets and some girls from another class were even part of a makers association. She decided to design bags, so she asked her mother to buy her a sewing machine. They bought it from Top Shop, a teleshopping business, and Oana remembers she could only use it once. She managed to create a bag out of some old jeans, even if the sewing machine could not handle the entire job and she had to sew by hand the last part. She posted it on her newly made blog and on breslo.ro, a site for handmade clothes and accessories. Her bag was bought in two hours, so Oana knew her business was going to work. Now, several years later, Oana still makes bags and she sells them through her facebook profile.

Elena Calistru is the chair and founder of Funky Citizens, a Romanian NGO that builds research-based, data-driven online advocacy tools. Their tools aim to be educational and actionable, encouraging citizens to engage in accountability and government responsibility initiatives in which they can see an impact.

Elena has over 8 years experience in civil society projects, both at national and international level. Her expertise is mainly in the area of good governance, transparency, public finance and advocacy. She strongly believes that data and online tools can empower citizens to influence public sector reform.