Mellika Melouani Melani, a theater and opera director with a background as an actor and artistic director at Folkoperan in Stockholm.

“Mellika Melouani Melani surprises, unsettles, delves deep, and impresses as a theater maker.” (The jury for the Theater Critics' Award)

“The theater emphasizes its artistic distinctiveness now more than ever. Instead of being shackled by fixed scripts and psychological realism, performing arts explore the boundaries between convention, genres, and fiction. Strong directors never let the audience feel safe, either as individuals or as social constructs.” (Lars Ring, SvD)

Starting on Stockholm’s independent theater scene, she has worked within a conceptual performance tradition that includes professional singers and actors as well as ordinary people. These “attempts,” as she calls the concepts, have been applied to both classical and newly written works.

In 2011, she received the Swedish Theater Critics' Award for works including *Arabian Men’s Bullied Bodies*, which was an art exhibition with a vernissage at Röda Sten during the Dance and Theater Festival in 2010.

Ordinary people have taken part in many of Mellika’s works in so-called “concertante concepts,” meaning concepts for choir and orchestra works. The groundbreaking *Carmina Burana*, based on the life stories of 80-year-old women, sold out for three years at Folkoperan.

In more traditional opera works, her aim has been to achieve absolute relevance.

In Titta en Älg, Mellika has adapted and created a work with music by Mikael Karlsson and the choir Stockholm City Voices, which is playing to sold-out audiences on the main stage at The Royal Dramatic Theatre.