MICHAELA LIND
Filmmaker, Award-Winning Performer, Co-Founder of ARA - “She wears the elements of all the great female clowns” - Stagebiz
WHERE IS NOW
An Absurd spin on our impending doom
A cinematographic love letter to the ocean and its most majestic inhabitants, our Whales, by Filmmaker Michaela Lind. Inspired by the absurdist writer Daniil Kharms and the band Sigur Ros. This absurd existential narrative short film examines our awareness in the era of increasing doom.
coming soon
ARA THEATER AND MEDIA
ARA is a multidisciplinary theater and production company founded by Michaela Lind and Drew Valins with a combined 40+ years of experience working as award-winning performers and creators. Their work has toured globally (Edinburgh Fringe, Israel, Prague, and Sweden,) and has been featured in unique venues (Public Theater/Under the Radar, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Ted Talks, The Swedish and Czech Embassies in DC, The Beijing Children’s Opera, to name a few). They have worked with true artistic luminaries such as Slava Polounin (of Slava’s Snowshow), Bill Irwin, Kendall Cornell, and David Shiner, and they have had the esteemed audiences of the Dalai Lama and Madeline Albright.
LAKEPLAY
A WORLD PREMIERE PLAY PRODUCED BY THE DRILLING COMPANY in association with ARA THEATER
A new Lovestory + Horror-Mystery from Drew Valins: A Brooklyn couple gets a tip for an idyllic month-long stay in a cabin on a lake in upstate NY. It’s 2020, COVID. With a few dreams in tow and hopes of starting a family, they head north. But when they meet the caretaker of the cabin, a terrifying adventure begins that will change them forever.
At
The Wild Project, NYC Oct 3-20, 2024
The Embassy of the Czech Republic in Washington DC presents Drew Valins in a staged reading of a new adaptation of one of Kafka’s last unfinished short stories – Der Bau (The Burrow), directed by Michaela Lind, on June 11, 2024, at 6:30 pm. Written approximately six months before his death, Kafka allegedly wrote an ending to the story, but the completed version was destroyed by his lover following his death. Join us as we commemorate the 100th anniversary of Kafka's passing with this new adapted work.
Presented by the Czech Embassy in collaboration with ARA Theater and Media and the Alliance for New Music Theatre.
“Audience members praised the production's excellent pacing, which effectively conveyed themes of alienation, anxiety, and paranoia.” Embassy of the Czech Republic in Washington, DC
Piff Paff Poof - THE MAGIC OF NOTHING
We discovered Daniil Kharms in 2020 via two artists whom we admire, Slava Polunin and Robert Wilson. From our initial inspiration we began exploratory work on the material and presented some of the texts at a couple of variety nights. The work began to take hold of us. The absurdity of the texts and the entire "Kharmsian" world gave us a stimulus for creation and a vehicle to stretch ourselves as clowns and theater performers. Our first showing took place at Theaterlab, NYC fall of 2023.
