Stav Meishar

Stav Meishar

Stav Meishar is an award-winning queer performance maker, multidisciplinary stage artist, academic researcher and educator. Their work explores the amalgamation of history and current affairs using tools from the worlds of theatre, circus, and contemporary performance.
Stav’s most recent project, The Escape Act: A Holocaust Memoir, is a one-woman show mixing puppetry, theatre and circus steeped in seven years of historic research. It is based on the true story of a Jewish acrobat who survived the Holocaust hiding at a German circus, and examines questions of antisemitism and multigenerational-trauma.
Stav’s next project, currently under development, is a devised theatre show blending circus and live art, exploring gender performance and body image via the true story of Barbette, star gender-bending circus artist of the early 20th century.
Born and raised in Israel and now based out of Bristol UK and New York City, Stav has performed on professional theater and circus stages; on the ground and in the air; in Hebrew, English and Yiddish; in works devised by themself and by others; all over Israel, America and Europe.
Stav is also the founder and director of Dreamcoat Experience, an award-winning educational organization which uses Performing Arts as tools for teaching progressive Judaism.
​Awards, Grants and Accolades:
Stav has won several awards including The Bindlestiff Family Cirkus First of May Award, The Jewish Education Project’s Young Pioneer Award, and the Jewish Week’s 36 Under 36.
To date, Stav’s stage work has been supported by Arts Council England, The Puffin Foundation, TelepART, The European Cultural Foundation, Loviisa Artist Studio, NoFit State Circus, Jacksons Lane, The Jewish Education Project, West of England Combined Authority, The Invisible Circus / Unit 15 Creation Space, and the Israeli Lottery Fund Mifal HaPais.
Their work has been commissioned by The Tate, DASH Arts, JW3 (UK), De Spil Cultuurcentum, Kunstercentrum Vooruit, Circuscentrum Vlaanderen (Belgium) and Kucku Festival (Finland).
Stav’s academic work has been presented at the Circus and Beyond Conference (University of Sheffield, 2018), Circus and Its Others Conference (Cirquon, Prague, 2018), Popular Culture Association National Conference (Washington DC, 2019; Winner of the Michael and Madonna Marsden Grant), The New School, Leo Baeck Institute NY, and more.
During Stav’s academic studies they were awarded the Rose Biller Scholarship, A. D. Felheim Scholarship, Bernard Osher Foundation Scholarship and Joan Howard Kersner Memorial Scholarship.