Who Do We Think We Are?
An In-Person Seminar on British Cypriot Representation in the Arts
The Theatro Technis, in collaboration with Kyriacos And Company, proudly presents Who Do We Think We Are?, a seminar dedicated to exploring the representation of British Cypriots within the broader cultural landscape of the Live and Recorded Arts.
The full line up has been announced.
This event, the first of its kind, kicks off with a welcome from two time Oliver award-winner UK-born Cypriot director, writer, and producer Kerry Kyriacos Michael MBE. He will set out the following questions: Who are the Cypriot artists and practitioners making waves in the UK? How have Cypriot artists and practitioners navigated the British creative landscape? Are they seen as British or foreign? To get their work on – do they self-label Greek, Cypriot, or neither or both? What stories do they want to tell? What stories are they expected to tell? And how different is the experience for those who emigrated here – to those who were born here?
The conference will feature guest speakers and panel discussions. The first set of speakers have been announced, these are:
Akin Gazi, an established actor known for roles in major productions such as Prison Break and the upcoming SKY thriller Atomic, brings insights from his diverse career in film and television, highlighting his journey as a Cypriot artist in the media. Anthony Anaxagorou is a British Cypriot poet and essayist who has made significant strides in literary circles with his award-winning works. He is the artistic director of Out-Spoken and has been recognised for his contributions to poetry and the arts community. Athena Mandis, a filmmaker and Senior Lecturer in Film Practice, has garnered acclaim for her works exploring migration and identity themes. Her projects range from feature films to award-winning short films, enhancing the discourse on Cypriot representation. Andy Charles, originally an actor trained at the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, is now an actor’s agent and a keen mental health advocate, emphasising well-being in the arts sector. Marcus Markou, acclaimed for his debut feature film Papadopoulos & Sons in 2012, is a celebrated filmmaker known for his innovative approach to the independent film industry. His latest work, The Wife and Her House Husband, continues establishing his voice in cinema with viral hits on YouTube and is approaching 4m views and Martha D. Lewis: An award-winning music maker, Martha has graced numerous international stages, including Glastonbury Festival. She has released two solo albums and has made significant contributions to the jazz genre while mentoring emerging artists. Sam Neophytou: An actor, writer and director. Who producer of his own 50-minute London Cypriot television drama called Bubbles and is the co-founder of the Crouch End Picture House. Dr Marilyn Panayi: An independent director/producer and has worked in the arenas of education, academic therapy, rehabilitation, cultural heritage and the arts in the UK, USA and across Europe. Marilyn has had a long-standing association with Theatro Technis, working as a volunteer with the Cypriot advisory service in the late 70’s, later becoming its cultural heritage producer and more recently as chair of the board of trustees. Cey Sesiguzel: A London-born Turkish Cypriot, and is best known as the producer and director of The Divided Island, an award-winning feature-length documentary that explores the Cyprus conflict and the co-owner of Two Fresh Productions, with Two Fresh Distribution, a company dedicated to bringing films from the Mediterranean to the big screen in the UK. The list of speakers end with the chairperson and compare fo the event Kerry Kyriacos Michael MBE: He is a director, writer, and producer and is the creative director of Theatre Technis and heads up the production company Kyriacos And Company. He is a twice Olivier Award-winning producer and director and former Artistic Director of Theatre Royal Stratford East.
The seminar promises to explore critical questions regarding the visibility of Cypriot artists, their navigational experiences within the British creative industry, and the narratives they wish to tell. The event will have three main sections: working in live arts, recorded arts, and the intersection of academia, social politics, and cultural leadership.
As a unique platform for fostering cultural identity, Who Do We Think We Are? invites anyone interested in the arts to engage in these discussions.
All sessions will be recorded for online dissemination, ensuring that the discussions continue.
For more information and to book your place, please visit Theatro Technis.
Listing information:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Who Do We Think We Are?
An In-Person Seminar on British Cypriot Representation in the Arts
Date: Friday, 28 February 2025
Time: 1:30 PM – 6:00 PM (followed by drinks and networking)
Location: Theatro Technis, 26 Crowndale Road, London NW1 1TT
Tickets from £10 from www.theatrotechis.com
Biographies.
About Theatro Technis
Founded in 1957 by George Eugeniou, Theatro Technis has been an independent company and venue for over six decades. Now, with Kerry Kyriacos Michael MBE joining as its Creative Director, a new era is beginning. Kerry, known for his passion for culturally diverse and disruptive work and leadership of Theatre Royal Stratford East, aims to bring fresh perspectives to the organisation. Nestled between King’s Cross and Camden, Theatro Technis has a rich history of celebrating both local and international artists. With resident companies over the years, such as Tamasha Theatre Company, Gate Theatre, Scene and Heard, The Production Exchange, and London Sinfonietta, the venue continues to expand its programme. Hosting popular events like the Camden Fringe Festival and Shubbak Festival and showcasing emerging talent from around the world, Theatro Technis remains a vibrant hub for innovative Theatre and performance. At its heart, the venue is dedicated to serving its diverse and dynamic community.
www.theatrotechnis.com
@TTechnis
Kerry Kyriacos Michael MBE
Kerry is a second-generation Cypriot. He heads up Kyriacos And Company, a UK-based production company that makes TV, FILM, and Theatre, developing various pieces in the UK and US.
From Sept 2004 to Sept 2017, he was Artistic Director & Chief Executive of Theatre Royal Stratford East. For 13 years, he forged the Theatre’s commitment to developing new work and providing a platform for under-represented voices. He won two Olivier Awards, received seven nominations, attained two What’s on Stage Awards, and earned the UK Best Touring Theatre Award. His inaugural season was nominated for an Olivier Award for: ‘a powerful season of provocative work that reaches new audiences.’ Its hip-hop production, Pied Piper, won an Olivier that year, while Kerry’s production of Cinderella was nominated for an Olivier, marking the first pantomime in the Awards’ history. Other nominations since then include You Me Bum Bum Train, Roadkill, Oh What A Lovely War, and The Government Inspector. In March 2018, Kerry won Artistic Director of the Year at the OFF WEST END Awards and was awarded the Freedom of the City of London. In the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours List, he was made an MBE for services to the Arts. He was also a founding member and chair of MENA Arts UK.
He is currently a board member of the British Council’s Arts Advisory Group, and on the executive board of the performing arts and entertainment trade union, EQUITY. In June 2022, he also became the creative director of Theatro Technis.
www.kmichael.info
ANDY CHARLES
Andy is a UK born (North London) Cypriot.
He trained as an actor at Queen Mary & Westfield College and the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama. As an actor, favourite roles include Eisenring in The Fireraisers (Teatro della Contraddizione, Milan), John Smith in Caught in the Net (Vaudeville Theatre, West End), Henry Higgins in an international tour of Pygmalion and PC Steve Latham in the TV series Gimme 6. He is particularly proud of his work on Gimme 6 as the series was commissioned to build mutual respect and understanding amongst children living in Cyprus’ Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot communities with a view to providing positive images of the two communities and help to demystify and break down negative stereotypes. He then moved to the other side of the table and became an agent and has been running his agency since 2002. He adores his work and loves nothing more than seeing his clients growing and being creative in the arts. He is passionate about mental health and well-being (particularly for those working in the arts) and is also a clinical psychotherapist and hypnotherapist. He runs his practice alongside his work as an agent. He is now based in Buckinghamshire with his partner, cats and dog.
Akin Gazi
Akin was born and raised in London, England and is a second-generation Turkish Cypriot. He has played a number of diverse roles in television and film. He will be appearing as Sayed Ahman in the upcoming SKY thriller Atomic opposite Samira Wiley, and as General Baruch opposite Sam Worthington in the feature film Bethlehem (dir. Alejandro Monteverde), due for release in December 2025. He played the recurring role of Rashid, leader of the Hashashin in the History Channels Knightfall and Prince Bayezid in David Goyer’s Starz production Da Vinci’s Demons. He also played recurring cast member Omar in hit TV series Prison Break. His film debut was in Lee Tamahori’s The Devil’s Double playing war hero and widower Saad. This was followed by Day of the Falcon aka Black Gold directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud where he utilized his falconry and horse-riding skills for the role of Prince Saleeh.
He worked with Golden Bear/Cannes winning director Fatih Akin in The Cut, opening the 2014 Venice Film Festival. Akin played Hrant, a peaceful family man who encounters the horrors of war during the Armenian Genocide. Other film credits include Close and Yardie. Akin has several TV credits. He starred alongside Ray Winstone in the ITV drama The Trials of Jimmy Rose. Notably he portrayed brutal sadist and gangster Bekir Yilmaz as guest lead in Silent Witness – Undertone for the BBC. Other credits in TV include FBI International, Out There, Doctor Who, Spooks, Hunted, Law & Order UK and HBO Drama The Path to 9/11.
Anthony Anaxagorou FRSL
Anthony is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist and publisher. His third collection, Heritage Aesthetics published with Granta Poetry in 2022, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2023 and was shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award. It was listed as one of New Statesman’s top books of 2022. His second collection, After the Formalities published with Penned in the Margins, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize along with the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. It was also a Telegraph and Guardian poetry book of the year. In 2020 he published How To Write It with Merky Books; a practical guide fused with tips and memoir looking at the politics of writing as well as the craft of poetry and fiction along with the wider publishing industry. Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press. He is the editor-in-chief of Propel Magazine, an online literary journal featuring the work of poets yet to publish a first collection. In 2019 he was made an honorary fellow at the University of Roehampton. In 2023 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Athena Mandis
Athena is a second-generation Greek Cypriot award-winning filmmaker and Senior Lecturer in Film Practice at QMUL, whose journey began in theatre with the David Glass Ensemble. Her work has screened at festivals world-wide. Her feature film script XENOS won best script at Cyprus IFF 2018, selected onto the Torino Film Lab 2019 and shortlisted for Sundance Screenwriters Lab 2021. A further feature script LOSING GRACE was selected to the HerArts Film Lab in Paestum 2022. Her short film Losing Grace has been screened at over 60 IFFs and has won numerous awards. Her short THE RETURN, was selected for Pitch Lab in Drama (2022), Greece. Recently her documentary CAMDEN TO ENFIELD – A CYPRIOT NMIGRATION STORY screened at a series of venues. She is currently in post on a micro feature film BRIGHTON HOUSE she directed and produced in July 2024 and in development with two feature films: and adaptation of the novel THE SUMMER WILL COME by Soulla Christodoulou, and an original comedy feature SAY SORRY!
Marcus Markou
Marcus is a Greek Cypriot from Birmingham, gained acclaim with his debut feature film, Papadopoulos & Sons(2012), a comedy-drama that he wrote, directed, and self-distributed. Defying traditional routes, Marcus successfully brought the film to cinemas in the UK with the second highest screen average in its opening weekend on a P&A budget of just £40k. The film was picked up by ARTE, Netflix, the BBC (among others) and secured a 100-screen release in Germany. His latest feature, The Wife and Her House Husband (2023), further cemented Marcus’s reputation as an independent filmmaker and distributor of his own work. He hired the Prince Charles for three weeks, which triggered national press reviews which in turn landed him a theatrical release in Australia and distribution – proving that “four walling” still has a place for indies. This movie can now be seen on Amazon Prime. His short film Two Strangers Who Meet Five Timescontinues to be a viral hit on Youtube and is approaching 4m views. Marcus brings invaluable insights into taking control of your own creative career and the art of telling stories that matter.
Martha D. Lewis
Since the start of her career in the 1990s, award-winning British-Cypriot music maker Martha D. Lewis has appeared on over 15 live television performances with over 100 national and international radio interviews. Trail-blazing beginnings as one half of the creative duo ‘Donna and Kebab’ (with Eve Polycarpou) saw live performances at The Royal Festival Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall. Martha + Eve released 3 records and were festival favourites taking to the stage at Glastonbury Festival, Reading Festival et al. From 2000, Martha has released 2 solo albums of contemporary jazz world music been featured in numerous world and jazz festivals including many appearances at the EFG London Jazz festival. An established music maker whose credits include composing for film, TV, theatre and commissions. Martha is a member of the Jazz Council at the Ivors Academy, where she also provides music career mentorship for emerging young artists for Help Musicians UK. Since 1996, Martha has directed the Independent Record label Budd. Martha has primarily been programmed and listed as a jazz singer-songwriter, but her musical genre is multi-dimensional taking in blues, world and art-pop. Martha is previously well-known for her emotive interpretations of 1920’s Greek blues, providing a new contribution to the borders of world and contemporary jazz music. Martha’s new release sees giant leaps as a jazz singer – songwriter, signalling a new direction of artistic growth. Before this, Martha was presenter and singer in the Globally released feature-film documentary entitled ‘My Sweet Canary’. The film about the life and work of the first Lady of the Greek Blues – Roza Eskenazy – inspired Martha’s 2016 CD release ‘Homage To Roza’. Featuring the legendary drummer Jack De Johnette, the album was a stimulating new contribution to the margins and borders of World music fusing the urban blues of Athens in the 1920’s with Urban London. The courageous interpretations and arrangements of music from 20’s-50’s marked the meeting and melting pot of Eastern Mediterranean music and contemporary jazz.
Sam Neophytou
Sam is an actor, writer, director, and cinema builder/owner. He began his creative journey in 1982 as an actor in several new plays at the ILEA-funded Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone. While on the dole, he continued his journey to Theatro Technis, where George Eugeniou introduced him to the world of theatre of the absurd, the oppressed, and the original in his own inimitable way. Inspired by this new theatrical world and collaborating with three wonderful actors he met at Theatro Technis, he developed a comedy troupe called the Identical Quads. They toured London’s alternative comedy circuit, writing, directing, and performing sketches and songs satirizing the turmoil of 1980s London. While performing regular comedy nights at The Tom Allen Theatre in Stratford, East London, he was invited to be the director in residence for the Tom Allen young people’s ensemble. He directed several thought-provoking dramas and plays funded by Newham Arts Council at a time when councils invested in the creative arts. Alongside the comedy and his role at The Tom Allen, he set up the Mirror Theatre Company, producing plays by great European and American playwrights. Writing remained an important part of his creative development, moving from sketches to developing comedy sitcoms and comedy dramas. Working at Noel Gay TV, he developed several scripts and ideas for TV, focusing on brilliant scripts about London lives that remain unproduced. These were deemed by the BBC and Channel 4, the TV gatekeepers of the time, as too niche and minority interest for television. After a couple of years of to-ing and fro-ing with TV commissioners, he decided to produce his own 50-minute pilot episode of one of these series called Bubbles, which examines Greek myths of Cypriots living in London. Filmed in 2006 and starring Marina Sirtis and Peter Polycarpou, it premiered 19 years after it was made at The Arthouse Cinema, a cinema he built in 2014 in Crouch End where he grew up.
Dr Marilyn Panayi
Marilyn is Cypriot, born and educated in the UK. She began her academic studies with Zoological life science, comparative physiology and later developed her PhD. research in the field of cognitive science. Marilyn has worked in the arenas of education, academic therapy, rehabilitation, cultural heritage and the arts in the UK, USA and across Europe. She has an extensive creative arts and interactive technologies portfolio that includes film, music, mime, puppetry, theatre and interactive performing arts. Her philosophy derived from the cross-fertilization of art and science practice, has informed her work in robotics and telepresence, wearable technologies, embodied interactivity and the creative arts. She is passionate about creating spaces for harnessing human potential. She is a committed campaigner and advocate for human rights. Her work has included facilitating and providing platforms for under-represented voices and marginalised communities. Marilyn has had a long-standing association with Theatro Technis, since working as a volunteer with the Cypriot advisory service in the late 70’s, later becoming it’s cultural heritage producer and more recently as chair of the board of trustees. Marilyn is currently working as an independent director/producer on a drama-documentary project that examines the nature and evolution of cultural heritage and identity.
Cey Sesiguzel
Cey is a London-born Turkish Cypriot, and is best known as the producer and director of The Divided Island, an award-winning feature-length documentary that explores the Cyprus conflict. Released in UK cinemas in November 2024, the film delves into the island’s division and its enduring impact, featuring personal interviews and archival footage to provide a nuanced, multi-perspective narrative.
He is the co-owner of Two Fresh Productions, alongside his Greek Cypriot co-founder, Andreas Tokkallos. Their company has produced corporate and commercial video content for some of the world’s leading brands over the past 15 years.
Following the success of The Divided Island, the team launched Two Fresh Distribution, a company dedicated to bringing films from the Mediterranean to the big screen in the UK. Their first project under this banner is the biopic Stelios, a film that tells the story of legendary Greek singer Stelios Kazantzidis.