Meet ITAC's staff
Dr. Chen Alon
Combatants for Peace / Tel Aviv University
Co-Founder, CFP / Head of Community Theatre and Artivism (Art & Activism) Program, Tel Aviv University
Dr. Chen Alon is a theatre activist, director and scholar. He is the head of Community Theatre and Artivism (Art & Activism) Program in the Theatre Arts Department at Tel-Aviv University.
Chen is a co-founder of Combatants for Peace, a movement of Palestinian and Israeli combatants who have abandoned the way of violence and struggle together non-violently against the occupation. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, with Suleiman Khatib, Co-Founder of Combatants for Peace (2017-2018).
Activism in the complicated reality in Israel/Palestine led him, as a professional actor and director, to search and create new forms of activist theatre with conflicted groups of Palestinian and Israelis, prisoners, drug addicts, homeless people, refugees, people with disabilities, and more.
Chen is the founder of Holot Theatre, a company of African asylum seekers and Israeli citizens.
The ‘Polarized Model of Theatre of the Oppressed’ that Chen has developed in the past two decades is depicted in the documentaries Disturbing the Peace (Stephen Apkon & Andrew Young, 2015), and Between Fences (Avi Mograbi, 2016).
“As both an artist and a teaching artist, I see my identity through the lens of responsibility – using art-making and art education as tools for transforming reality. As an artist-activist (artivist), I strive to realize Augusto Boal’s vision of dismantling the passive role of the “”spectator”” in both theatre and life, instead empowering everyone who can, wants, or needs to engage as a “”spect-actor.””
To me, ITAC embodies this very mission – driving change within the international community while cultivating a dynamic, empowering network of artist-educators committed to reshaping the world through the arts.”