Meriam Bousselmi

Meriam Bousselmi is a Tunisian author, director, lawyer, and academic working at the intersection of justice, performance, writing, and critical aesthetics. She belongs to a generation of cultural practitioners who navigate across languages —Arabic, French, English, and German —and disciplines, pursuing a practice that unsettles the boundaries between discourse and action, and interrogates normative aesthetic and intellectual frameworks. Her work draws on lived experience as a point of departure for political reflection and artistic resistance, treating both text and stage as spaces where structures of power are dismantled and notions of (in)justice and shared responsibility are reimagined. Her projects span literature, theatre, performative installations, and theoretical writing; practices that consistently interrogate the thresholds between art and politics, between lived experience and institutional constraints. In 2012, she was awarded the Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohammed Al Qasimi Prize for Best Arabic Theatre Performance for her play Alzheimer. In recent years, she has developed practice-based academic and artistic collaborations with the Academy of the Arts in Berlin, the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne, and the University of Hildesheim, where she continues to shape a transdisciplinary, multilingual critical project grounded in aesthetic inquiry, political engagement, and transcultural reflection. Her major works include Truth Box, What the Dictator Did Not Say, A Look at the World, The Beauty in Between, HomeWord, and Sin of Success.