Dasha is an artist of Slav/Kazakh/Chinese heritage who works across live art and contemporary theatre as a maker, writer and performer. She is exploring photography, site-specific work, sound and listening practices, long-form journalism, difference dance styles and movement practices as part of an expanded practice. The potential of multidisciplinary practices to create experiences that memorialises and invites speculative thinking on climate change, globalisation, forced migration, feminist politics and human-technology relations excites her. She is also motivated by the challenge of writing plays that are engaging and provokes challenging conversations on a land with a rich tradition of storytelling and continued resistance by First Nations people but also culture of Australian silence created by settler colonialism. She is still refining her playwriting craft, learning rules in order to break them in order to say bold things about erotica, heteronormativity, gendered bodies, political polarisation, technological futurism, the formation of nationalism and the intersection between race, class and identity. She attempts to centre her practice around cross-cultural physical theatre traditions, satire to cut through political anger, reimagining theatre-making through the lens of disability access and queer feminist aesthetics, radical curating and sitting in the messiness of her early 20s.

Dasha started her theatre-making training at Western Edge Youth Arts (and continues to be involved), a community project in the Western Suburbs of Melbourne (a region with a predominantly working-class and large migrant demographic) focused on making bold sociopolitical art. She is also a Supermassive Artist (a mentorship/residency arrangement with an emphasis on pathways for long-term collaboration) at APHIDS, an intersectional feminist experimental art collective. Recently co-founded/artistically direct a disability student theatre company focused on creating devised theatre and political satire plays with a focus on the intersection between disability and gender, sexuality, class and race. Dasha is contracted by Arts Centre Melbourne as a Young Connector where she curates youth development programs and advises on the future direction of youth engagement with a focus on working-class and disability access.