CAROLINE HATEM
theatre director, choreographer, actress

Caroline studied Philosophy (Paris 8), acting (University of Arizona, Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, New-York) and specialised in dance in the United States, in France and Lebanon.

She’s worked with choreographer Alice Massabki, with theatre directors Edwin Gerard, Vanessa Ford, Koteit/ Andraos, Danielle Labaki, Nabil El Azan and filmmakers Luke Stettner, Michael Stone, Jean-Claude Codsi, Fouad Alaywan, Lara Saba, Rana Maalouf, Marwan Khneisser, Mohammad Sabbah, Anthony Yazbeck, Salomé Lamas.

She has created herself How they thought a table is a table (2008), The Joy Series (2009), the dancing solo of the collective piece JoKaRi (2009), Solitude (2010) the collective work Le Critère de Griffith (Beirut, 2015). Her latest choreographic work include Together We Walk, an immersive installation combined with live performance, produced by Yaraqa for Dubai 2020 then, in its hybrid form, for the British Council in June 2023.

Her first play, Al Beyt, by Arzé Khodr, has toured in Lebanon and Tunis (Carthage Theatre Festival) and won Best Actress and Best Script at the first edition of the Lebanese National Theatre Festival (2018). Her second play, Al Zifaf, an adaptation of Brecht’s A Respectable Wedding, represented Germany at the European Theatre Festival in Beirut in 2019. She adapted and directed in 2022 The Righteous by Albert Camus (Les Justes), in Lebanese dialect, which was performed at the Bacchus Temple in Baalbeck in 2022. Her fourth work, TRANSIT TRIPOLI, a free adaptation of Anna Seghers’ novel Transit, premiered at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin on November 2022, in partnership with the Schaubühne Theatre. It was performed at the superb Rachid Karame International Fair (architecture by Oscar Niemeyer) in Tripoli in June 2023.

Caroline teaches dance and movement for actors at the Art&Movement Dance School.

She is co-founder and president of YAZAN, and initiated the Network for Cultural Outreach, a project funded by the All Around Culture program (European Union) aiming at decentralising performing arts in Lebanon.

Caroline is a proud Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics fellow (2021-2023) and an International Society for the Performing Arts (ISPA) Global Fellow (2021-2022).