Faculty

Profile

Irina Kruzhilina is an award-winning theater maker whose roles include director, scenographer, experience designer, playwright, professor, and artistic director.

Raised in Moscow in an intercultural household with a Ukrainian mother and Georgian father, Ms. Kruzhilina creates work that grapples with social issues, exploring identity, displacement, and belonging. Since 2000, Irina has created over two dozen performances spanning interdisciplinary theatre, large-scale parades, opera, and site-responsive installations. Her work has been shown, locally and globally, at Times Square, Tokyo Disney, BAM, Prague National Theatre, the NY Philharmonic, the XXI Commonwealth Games, Barbican Center, and others.  

Currently, Irina’s work centers on two primary forms: site-specific performances and socially engaged projects with community members to address important issues like immigration, polarization, conflict, and peacebuilding.  

Relentless in her ambition and risk-taking, Irina pushes the boundaries of theatre to create work that is both artistically daring and socially urgent. In 2024, Ms. Kruzhilina launched SpaceBridge, a workshop program and performance uniting 19 refugee and American children— most of whom had never been on stage. Leading a team of 60 collaborators, I transformed their stories into a fully realized Off-Broadway production. After being named a critics' pick at the 2025 Under The Radar Festival, Irina is now expanding its workshop curriculum to develop new SpaceBridge performances with local and refugee youth in the U.S. and globally.  

Irina is the founder of Visual Echo, a New York-based performance organization fostering generative dialogues among people from diverse backgrounds who rarely intersect.  

Since 2019, Irina has been an integral part of the New School CoPA team. She has developed and taught a wide range of original courses in design, devising, directing and site-specific performance and made a significant contribution in shaping the curriculum for the MFA in Contemporary Theatre and Performance.  

Besides teaching at the New School of Drama Irina has also served as a guest lecturer at educational institutions, including at Yale School of Drama, California Institute of the Arts, Sarah Lawrence College, La Guardia Community College, Beloit College, Shanghai Theatre Academy, and Kulturakademin Trappan in Gotheborg, Sweden. Beyond these, she has led diverse workshops at national and global conferences and festivals including the Sibiu International Theatre Festival, the ITI World Congress, Fujairah Monodrama Festival, Baku International Theatre Conference, TCG National Conferences and the CrossCurrents Gathering.    

Irina is a La MaMa resident artist and recipient of the 2024 Joan D. Firestone Fund Award and the 2024 Elliot Norton Award.