Tina Turnheim, born 1984 in Vienna, studied Theatre, Film and Media Studies at Universität Wien. She graduated in 2008 with a thesis on the Theatrality of Punk (Magister).

In 2012, she completed an MA in Theatre Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Her thesis 'Sous les pavés, la rage' (Rage under the cobblestones) dealt with the uprising in the French banlieues and the situationist critique of urbanism.

After various internships in the areas of dramaturgy, directing and producing in youth and community theatres as well as at international festivals, she founded the collaborative network 'Europäische Gemeinschaft für Kulturelle Angelegenheiten – EGfKA' (European Community for Cultural Affairs). Drawing from multiple research stays in crisis-ridden Greece and working together with other students and lecturers, Turnheim has conceptualized various workshops and formats for the EGfKA. Since late 2012 she has been a member of the T/A/T section of EGfKA (together with Sabrina Apitz and Florian Thamer). Their staging 'FATSA/KOINA: Athen', produced together with accomplices, premiered at the third Mülheimer Fatzer-Tage in the Ringlokschuppen in Mühlheim in July 2013.

In 2012, Turnheim was awarded a scholarship from the International Research Training Group 'Interart Studies' at Freie Universität Berlin.

In Search of the Lost Real. On the Conjuncture of 'Times of Crisis' and the Documentary (working title)

'Wo Geister früher kamen aus Vergangenheit, so jetzt aus Zukunft ebenso' (Brecht, Fatzer)

Starting from the observation that explicitly political/documentary models of theatre flourish in times in which the socio-political and economic crisis-prone character of capitalism becomes more visible, the contemporary return of the documentary in the arts is understood as a symptom of a present experienced as crisis-laden and hopeless. Here, it is less the lack as rather the excess and montage of information which produces disorientation.

Not succumbing to such an endlessly prolonged present (in which future seems to be degraded to sustainability, hence to the management and protection of the present state of things), performative experiments with time and history try to speak about and maybe even to experimentally design times and places beyond the 'here and now'.

The analysis focuses accordingly on future archives, conversations with ghosts, re-petition, theatrical remixes and new configurations, not just of re-enactments but especially of pre-enactments. As the latter seem to radically extract themselves from the discursive take on the documentary and seem to search for a new relation to fiction and documents through resisting the reality principle, it is one goal of the dissertation to try to theorize this phenomenon.

In accounting equally for aesthetic and political questions, the dissertation asks if and to what extent performative practices and theatrical experiments can initiate and investigate imaginations, perceptions and practices reaching beyond the present state of things.