Michaela Lind

Michaela Lind is an award-winning performer, filmmaker, and theater artist whose work bridges borders, disciplines, and the sublime space between laughter and silence. As co-founder of ARA Theater & Media, she creates from a deeply embodied practice shaped by two decades of performance, a nomadic artistic journey, and an insatiable curiosity about ritual, transformation, and storytelling.

Her path began in Sweden, where a single evening watching John Caird's A Midsummer Night's Dream ignited something irreversible. Michaela followed that spark to Moscow's legendary GITIS-Moscow Art School, then across continents to New York City, where she carved her own unique degree in Ritual Focused Performance Techniques through CUNY's Baccalaureate program—studying with masters from around the world. She's trained with clown luminaries Slava Polunin, Bill Irwin, and David Shiner, toured solo clown shows to Edinburgh Fringe under the guidance of Kendall Cornell and Felix Ivanov, and performed internationally since debuting with Beijing's Children's Opera twenty years ago.

Michaela's artistic language is multilingual: she speaks in movement, film, and live presence. Her filmmaking studies span HDK Valand (Ruben Östlund's alma mater), DCTV, BRIC Media Arts, and the School of Visual Arts, while her material craft extends to set dressing and props through Stockade Works. This multidisciplinary foundation infuses everything she creates with texture, depth, and an eye for the poetic in the everyday.

Currently, Michaela is bringing her award-winning narrative short film Where is Now—recipient of Best International Short Film Script in Stockholm, Sweden, and archived at FILMS OF RETURNS climate art website via A La Luz—to international festivals and grassroots screenings. She's completing the documentary Meänmaa, a tender exploration of her father's minority heritage in Sweden's Arctic Circle, and directing a collective of filmmakers on upcoming projects including Look Into My Palm (exploring NYC's psychic subculture), Americas National Treasure (where creative boundaries blur), and PLASTICUM, a climate-oriented work confronting our collective anxiety around plastic. As part of the Suite 542 ensemble, she performs in immersive dinner theater experiences in NYC. She recently directed an adaptation of Kafka's Der Bau, which debuted at the Czech Embassy in Washington, DC, and traveled to Mexico City, and devised the absurdist piece Piff, Paff, Poof—The Magic of Nothing for Theaterlab.

Whether behind the camera, on stage, or in the collaborative alchemy of creation, Michaela seeks the moments where art becomes ritual, and ritual becomes transformation.