Ivan Buraj (1988) has been the new artistic director of Divadlo v Dlouhé since the 2025/26 season. For ten years, he worked as artistic director of Brno’s HaDivadlo, where he created, among other things, a series of interpretations of classic plays by Chekhov, Ibsen, and Havel, and where he developed a socially engaged and interdisciplinary repertoire over the long term, leading, for example, leading to the creation of film remediations (Provincials, Eyolf), and has participated in the creation of original theatre texts (Ours, Humanism 2022). Under his leadership, the theatre has established itself as a generational studio theatre with a significant reach into the public sphere.

A native of Bratislava and a graduate of the directing program at JAMU Academy, he attracted significant attention early in his career with his ambitious adaptation of Broch’s trilogy The Sleepwalkers (Imitation and Hunch) (2016). With staging Gorky’s Provincials (Divadelní noviny Award 2019), Buraj initiated a line of productions dealing with realism in the context of the crisis of an individual isolated in their inability to perceive others.

Another distinct line that threads through Buraj’s work is the reflection on climate change and the effort to integrate radical ecology into the theatre process. In light of this belief, he directed the productions Ours, Perception and Kosmos (at the National Theatre), which together with the productions Provincials and Stiller (at Studio Hrdinů) form Buraj’s trilogy of critiques of anthropocentrism. He has guest-directed at the National Theatre, Studio Hrdinů, the Moravian-Silesian National Theatre, and the Drama Studio in Ústí nad Labem.

Flora has consistently followed Ivan Buraj’s artistic work: in 2022, it featured five of his productions as part of its directing profile, and in 2024, it organized a trip to HaDivadlo to see his acclaimed production It’s Only the End of the World.