Olympia Bukkakis' portrait
Photography: Ceren Saner

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Queen of the Heavens and of the Earth, Empress of Despair, and Architect of Your Eternal Suffering, Olympia Bukkakis is a drag queen, choreographer, moderator, and writer living and working in Berlin.

She began performing while completing a BA in social theory at Melbourne University in Australia and kick-started the local alternative drag scene with her party Pandora’s Box. At the same time she collaborated with queer theatre company Sisters Grimm on a number of projects.

Since moving to Berlin in 2012, she has organised, curated, and moderated various queer performance nights including Get Fucked, Apocalypse Tonight and Queens Against Borders. In 2017 she began to perform in contemporary dance and performance contexts, collaborating with Jeremy Wade. In 2019 she completed a Masters in Solo Dance Authorship at the Inter-University Centre for Dance (HZT) in Berlin with her graduation piece Tales From a State of Shemergency.

Since then she has premiered a number of new works including, Gender Euphoria (2019), Work on Progress (2019), Under Pressures (2019), A Touch of the Other (2020), Too Much (2021), Boys Night Out (2023), and replay (2023).

Olympia has published a number of writing pieces. Gender Euphoria: Trans and Nonbinary Identities in Drag was published by Bloomsbury as part of Contemporary Drag Practices and Performers: Drag in a Changing Scene and a polemic titled A Case for the Abolition of Men is available through HKW as part of Counter Readings of the Body via Spektor Books.

She is inspired by tensions and intersections between queer nightlife and contemporary dance and performance.