Sam Williams

Pronouns: they/she

Sam Williams is a writer, director and dramaturg, working between theatre, film and visual art in London, Berlin and Istanbul, and in English, French and German and Russian.

Sam’s work as a writer and director creates epic stories that explore the emergence of a new era and new types of people inhabiting it. In particular, Sam’s work connects colonialism with the devastation of working-class rural lifeways, the struggle for land, life, love and faith in human, natural and built environments and the new futures that flow from that. She combines classical dramaturgy with performance, visual art, documentary and non-art practices and puts radical politics, ecology and future-thinking onstage. Sam began her career as a writer and director in Berlin as art editor of the city’s English language-magazine and collaborating with artists to stage events underground project spaces that combined visual art, theatre, poetry, dance, radical politics, and experimental lifestyles.

Sam’s theatre work has been awarded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Scholarship, Kone Foundation Saari Fellowship and National Theatre Playwriting Bursary, and her work has appeared at London’s Camden People’s Theatre and Berlin’s Volksbühne. Sam's writing at the intersection of theatre, art and politics has appeared in the UK for Frieze, Tribune, Aesthetica, The Stage, The Guardian, and BBC; ARTnews in the US; and JO Magazine and Palestine Note in the Middle East. Academic publications include the Scènes Critiques, the journal of the International Association of Theatre Critics.

Sam grew up between the Wychwood Forest and the Rollright Stones - the last remaining patch of England's primal forest and an ancient stone circle. She was born into a family of builders and market gardeners - communities devastated by industrial farming, globalized construction and second-homers. The first person in her family to study beyond 16, she found opportunities to study or work precariously in Paris, Berlin, Moscow and Istanbul to learn from the interconnected cultural and artistic traditions and histories there.

Sam specializes in experimental dramaturgy, teaches writing and editing and has led workshops at the Austrian Cultural Foundation, Brecht House Berlin, and Central School of Speech and Drama, London.

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