ABOUT

Sam Hunter is a Berlin-based director, author, and dramaturg whose practice is built on physical research and collective devising. His work examines how collective narratives become personal conviction, and then collective behavior — how the stories we inherit about who we are, who has wronged us, and what we owe shape the way we move through the world. Working with ensembles, he generates text and movement, and stages them within the mythological structures the stories were first carried in — structures that continue to shape what the contemporary material can do and say. His practice moves along two research lines: Jewish memory and diaspora, and inherited mythology as a social force.

His current project The Red Jews traces Jewish revenge narratives from the Purimshpiel tradition through twentieth-century displacement and into the present; a preliminary research phase was supported by a Fonds Darstellende Künste TakeHeart grant in 2023. In parallel, he is developing The Elviad, a tetralogy on American mythology anchored by Elvis Presley and the Parthenon of Nashville. The project explores how a culture turns historical figures into figures of civic religion, and what the export of American popular culture reveals about the American empire and its decline. Preliminary research was supported by the STAR Artist in Residence program in 2021.

In 2025 he co-founded Notizen, a Berlin collective for the regular development and presentation of new devised performance. Notizen has presented work at Expedition Metropolis and Brotfabrik Berlin, with new iterations twice yearly.

His recent Berlin productions include Wandersterne after Sholem Aleichem (stage adaptation and text, with dramaturg Julie Paucker, Vagantenbühne 2021) and Olympia! Olympia! Olympia! (ensemble devising, Theaterhaus Mitte 2019). He has taught Viewpoints and ensemble composition, as well as History of Acting and Classical Texts at BIMM University Berlin, Cours Florent, and ActorFactory.

He came to Berlin in 2017 as a Bundeskanzlerstipendiat of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, hosted as a visiting researcher at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch, where he examined how funding structures and ensemble organization shape German theater's relationships to artists and audiences. The study was published in American Theatre Magazine in 2021.

His formative early-career work was as a founding member of the Hungry River Theater Company, an experimental collective devising new performance in the Mojave Desert. He trained at UC San Diego.