Maison Marcelle

A collective for Jewish writers in Berlin. 🍉 WRITERS Julia Bosson Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus Alex Cocotas Tamar Raphael Hila Amit Sanders Isaac Bernstein Siena Powers Photo by Alex Cocotas

Imogen Huzel (she/her) is an English circus and visual artist. After spending a cold chunk of her life studying in Stockholm, Sweden, she graduated from Dans Och Cirkushögskolan in 2016, specialising in hand balancing. Alongside her performance practice, Imogen has worked with analogue photography for over a decade. She shoots, develops and prints her own photographs, a quiet and deeply personal practice that continues to shape her artistic perspective. Currently living a complicated love story with Berlin—home, although life is often lived elsewhere—Imogen has spent the past decade shaped by a nomadic existence of touring and creating. For the past five years, Imogen has dedicated most of her creative energy to her joint company, Based On Kimberly—a punk, playful and provocative creation house that keeps her excited about life. Imogen has performed in more than 30 countries. Recent collaborations include a five-month run of Play Dead by People Watching at the Chamäeleon Theatre in Berlin, Hands Up with director Ofir Yudilevitch, and For as Long as We're Here, a durational hand-balancing project. Before co-founding Based On Kimberly, she toured extensively with her previous companies Right Way Down and Fauna Circus. Her main goal continues to be staying in touch with creativity in whatever way feels intriguing, and believing in art as a way of bringing people closer.

A writer of narrative non-fiction, her work is both personal and political, with recurring themes of time and memory. Her journalism has appeared in *The Times*, *The Guardian*, and *The National Trust for Scotland* magazine. Her debut book, *Constitution Street* (404Ink, 2019), weaves together the true stories of neighbours on a diverse street through the lens of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Part memoir, part social history, it won the Creative Edinburgh Award in 2019. Her later work, *Chime, notes on living*, is an experimental hybrid of autofiction and essays exploring memory, the body, and maternal healthcare. She has also contributed to several anthologies and was writer-in-residence at Maison Marcelle in France in 2026, supported by Creative Scotland.

Julia Walk is a multimedia artist based in Munich. In 2022, she completed her diploma with distinction as a master student of Professor Peter Kogler at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. In her artistic practice, she explores bodies, gender issues, and pop culture. By questioning socially constructed body norms and stereotypes, she creates multi-layered installations, performances, and objects. Her aesthetic is boldly colorful; an artificial finish contrasts with bodily, organic surfaces. Her works often have a humorous quality, lending accessibility and lightness to the feminist discourse inherent in them. Exchange and communication with the audience are very important to the artist. She lives and works in Munich.

Kaleb Erdmann (b. 1991, Witten an der Ruhr) is a German author and playwright. He studied Creative Writing at the German Literature Institute Leipzig and has received multiple awards and nominations, including the lit.COLOGNE Debut Prize for his first novel wir sind pioniere (Ullstein, 2024). His second novel, Die Ausweichschule (2025), was shortlisted for the German Book Prize and awarded the Bremen Literature Prize Förderpreis. Alongside his prose, Erdmann writes for the stage; his play Debritz received the Kleist Förderpreis for Young Playwrights and premiered in 2026. He has also worked as a writer for television and has received several grants and residencies supporting his literary work. Photo von: Felix Adler

Ludwig Dressler (*1998, Munich) is an artist exploring how digital media shape human perception, behavior, and embodied experience. Working across video, digital photography, programming, 3D printing, and animation, his practice examines how images, screens, and virtual environments leave physical and psychological traces. A recurring motif is his own body—particularly the hand—as a site of interaction between human presence and technological abstraction. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, and LMU Munich, engaging with media theory and contemporary art discourse. In 2024, he joined the class for digital media and AI led by Hito Steyerl and Francis Hunger at AdBK Munich. Alongside his artistic work, Dressler is active in curatorial and technical roles, including as a media workshop assistant at AdBK Munich. He initiated the exhibition series “Echt.” and co-curated “Imposters” (2024). Based in Munich’s Kreativquartier Dachauerstraße, he continues to investigate how digital technologies become materially and sensorially embedded in everyday life.

Lukas has a background in psychology and ethics, with early experience in applied ethics and documentary photography. He later worked as a creator before transitioning into entrepreneurship. He is currently building bookie, a community-driven platform that reimagines how people connect around books. Through this work, he aims to foster meaningful connections through shared reading experiences while empowering authors to engage directly with their audiences and retain greater control over their work.

Nata Togliatti is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores boundaries, patterns, and interconnected systems. Drawing on her experience between Russian and German cultures, she uses ornament as a metaphor to challenge fixed categories and highlight complexity in social and ecological relations. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in Berlin, Munich, Düsseldorf, and New York.

Patrik Gräb works across writing, artistic research, cultural organizing, and curation. He is Program Director of the Kemmler Foundation in Berlin, where he recently initiated the European residency network COORDINATES. He co-runs Literaturhaus Neukölln with Nele Mailin Obermüller and publishes the weekly newsletter Reading List Berlin together with Theresia Enzensberger.

Paul Valentin (b. 1990) is an artist based in Munich. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Munich in 2019 and is a Meisterschüler of Stefan Huber and Alexandra Bircken. His work engages with questions of ontology, exploring themes such as emergence, non-linear temporality, and the limitations of Western dualistic thinking. Working primarily with CG-based video, he also incorporates sculpture, film music, and hybrid forms of painting and photography. Drawing on influences ranging from scenography—shaped by his upbringing as the son of a theatrical sculptor—to literature and science fiction, his practice examines how realities are constructed and perceived. Central to his work is the ongoing narrative FORMULA (since 2021), a speculative framework that informs many of his projects. Through a process of abstraction, Valentin uses this narrative to explore broader philosophical questions around artificiality and naturalness, creativity, and the evolving relationship between humans and generative systems.

Ramona Liberoff is a long-term investor, founder, and champion of impact innovation with over 20 years’ experience supporting entrepreneurs addressing global challenges. She has been part of multiple founding teams, invested in more than twenty enterprises, led an impact accelerator in East Africa and South Asia, and held a leadership role at a climate-focused investment firm. She is currently Senior Advisor at Roots of Impact, where she works to advance innovative financing for high-impact ventures. Ramona is also co-founder of Gist Books, an initiative making high-quality nonfiction on critical issues—such as energy, food, and finance—more accessible to wider audiences. She holds master’s degrees from Yale University and the London School of Economics and is now based in Berlin after 25 years in London.

Robyn Bennett is a Berlin-based facilitator and systems thinker working at the intersection of culture, public systems, and social change. Raised in rural England and shaped by time in London, Cambridge, and Buenos Aires, her work explores how human systems can become more life-giving, interconnected, and responsive to the challenges of our time. For the past five years, she has been a core force behind the Creative Bureaucracy Festival, a global platform highlighting innovative public leadership and systemic transformation. Alongside this, she designs and facilitates transformative gatherings, connects changemakers across fields, and develops learning experiences that support more joyful and regenerative ways of shaping collective life. Currently working independently, Robyn focuses on weaving connections between people, ideas, and initiatives—guided by a deep interest in systems thinking, culture, and the patterns that underpin meaningful change.

Stefanie Salzmanns artistic practice begins with materials and their story, such as her family's Blacknose sheep wool in Valais (CH), which has become a worthless byproduct of sheep farming. She investigates the materiality and uses it for her tapestries and sculptures. The textiles explore the insulating and protective aspects of felt and speak about touch, the connection between people, the environment and the crafting process. The meaning and rituals established during the process are crucial to her works. Stefanie accompanies the material from animal or plant to sculpture. She undertakes this journey physically and mentally. Physically through craft techniques like felting that allow her to engage with the wool, flowers, water, and heat through her body. On the other hand, mental journeys; through her work, she creates spaces that have an inhabited time of their own. The natural dyes she uses, tell the stories of their existence just like the wool and the works they become. With hands that felt, shape, sew, knot, express and comprehend, she paints intimate textures that seek a relation to the body of the viewer.

The BERG *1998, is a Munich based conceptual artist working in the fields of performance, installation, text and video. The works situate themselves around the artist’s image, space, procedure and the public itself. The BERG takes each work as an analytic research to form various series to reassure himself in the process of examining the most crucial dimension of his practise: The artist and the public. This interaction, whether finalised in video, performance or installation, covers different actions of him with the audience as, restriction, appreciation or power balances.

A group of silent meditators returning each year to Maison Marcelle for 1-2 months.

Laura’s social impact career spans leadership roles in nonprofits, philanthropy, social enterprise, universities, and the public sector. She has co-led food security and girls’ education initiatives in Niger, co-drafted gender equity legislation in Liberia, co-founded clean energy efforts in Washington DC, co-led research initiatives at Princeton and Harvard universities, and supported nonprofit resilience and wellbeing of changemakers worldwide. Her published work has been featured in Foreign Policy, Center for Effective Philanthropy, and International Peacekeeping.

Christoph Peters is a writer and drawing artist. He was born in Kalkar on the Lower Rhine region in 1966. He studied painting at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts under H.E. Kalinowski, Günter Neusel and finally as a master student of Meuser. He lives in Berlin since 2000. He has published numerous novels and short stories. His most recent publications are the novel trilogy Der Sandkasten (2022). Krähen im Park Krähen im Park (2023) and Innerstädtischer Tod (2024). His work has received several awards, including the aspekte-Literaturpreis (1999), the Niederrheinischen Literaturpreis (1999 & 2022) and the Schubart Literaturpreis (2025).

Kit is a writer with a distinguished career spanning political and social justice advocacy, literature, and publishing. She is recognised for shaping political and cultural discourse through writing, trusteeships, and leadership roles in high-profile boards and committees. A strong advocate for underrepresented voices, she founded a Creative Writing Scholarship for writers from disadvantaged backgrounds and edited the acclaimed anthology Common People, celebrating working-class memoirs. Kit supports older writers through initiatives such as the Bridport Prize’s “Never Too Late” Award. Named FutureBook Person of the Year in 2019, she serves as patron of Prisoners Abroad, The Bridport Prize, and Writing West Midlands, and is an ambassador for Wellbeing in the Arts, Listening Books, and BookBanks. She also sits on the Advisory Board of Dead Ink Books and is a trustee of The Reading Agency. Her debut novel, My Name Is Leon, became an international bestseller, later adapted for television by the BBC and now featured on the GCSE curriculum.

Olga Shirobokova is a thought partner to citizen sector organizations, foundations, and philanthropists guided by a deep commitment to care for all humans and nature. She works in direct partnership with teams by facilitating strategy sessions and learning experiences, and in indirect ways by sharing her knowledge through open online courses and case studies. Her work focuses on helping organizations understand how to create systems-level impact, build confidence in their strategic direction, and use available resources effectively to improve the wellbeing of people and the planet. Olga’s expertise comes from designing strategies with more than 100 social entrepreneurs at Ashoka—the organization that founded the field of social entrepreneurship—as well as from her own practice of improving complex systems.

Veronika Peters, born in 1966, spent her childhood in Germany, the Republic of Congo and Ivory Coast. After training as a special needs teacher, she worked in a psychiatric youth home. In her early twenties she left so-called bourgeois life behind for a few years and joined a community of Benedictine nuns, where she worked as a gardener's assistant, restorer and bookseller. Since 2000, she has been living in Berlin as a freelance author. Her novels are about people searching for meaning, women who rebel against preconceived narratives and the courage to start a new life.

Toulu Hassani is a Cologne-based artist working primarily in non-figurative painting. Her gridded oil works take a subtle, decelerated approach, often incorporating cosmic and astrophysical references to explore ideas of infinity, causality, and spatial-temporal order. Her paintings reflect on the human drive to find structure in both the microcosm and macrocosm, balancing systems of logic with elements of chance and emotion. A graduate of the Braunschweig University of Art and the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Hassani has received numerous awards, including the Sprengel Prize for Fine Arts and the August Macke Prize. Her work has been featured in major exhibitions across Germany, including at the Sprengel Museum Hannover, Kunsthalle Bremen, and Kunsthalle Nürnberg. From 2023 to 2024, she was interim professor of painting and graphic art at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.

Selma Doborac (born 1982 in Bosnia and Herzegovina) is an artist and filmmaker living in Vienna. She works across essay, documentary, and experimental film, as well as photography and conceptual art. Doborac’s work has been presented at numerous international film festivals and exhibitions and has received awards and grants nationally and internationally. Her essay film Those Shocking Shaking Days (2016) won several international awards. Her feature documentary De Facto (2023) premiered at the 73rd Berlinale in the Forum section, where it received the Caligari Film Prize, and went on to screen at international festivals, earning further awards.

Irene Diwiak (b. 1991, Graz) grew up in Deutschlandsberg and studied Jewish Studies, Slavic Studies, and Comparative Literature in Vienna. Her debut novel Liebwies (2017) was shortlisted for the Austrian Book Award’s Debut Prize, followed by Malvita (2020), the story collection Guilty Pleasures (2021), and her third novel Sag Alex, er soll nicht auf mich warten (2023). She also wrote the play Die Isländerin (2016) and the libretto for the opera Elsa (2020). Diwiak has received numerous prizes and fellowships, including the Theodor Körner Prize, the Promotion Prize of the City of Graz, and a scholarship at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin.  

David Griffiths is a writer and consultant with two decades of experience in human rights and social impact. Formerly Deputy Director for Asia and later in a Chief of Staff–like role at Amnesty International, he left in 2021 to focus on future-facing work across human rights, climate, and global justice. He now advises NGOs, philanthropic institutions, and governments through his independent consultancy. As an Associate Fellow at Chatham House, he has published widely on the future of human rights in the face of major global challenges. His recent work includes supporting Vanuatu’s successful push for an International Court of Justice opinion on climate and human rights, and advising the International Crisis Group on long-term strategy. He is a member of the OSCE Panel of Experts on Freedom of Religion or Belief and is currently writing a book that brings together insights from his recent projects.

Emilia Roig is an award-winning social justice advocate, bestselling author, and expert on intersectionality and systemic inequalities and injustice. She has been shifting the discourse on these topics in Europe through the creation of the Berlin-based Center for Intersectional Justice (CIJ), and the publication of her bestselling books WHY WE MATTER and THE END OF MARRIAGE.

Agnes Krup worked as an editor, literary agent and publishing scout after studying in Hamburg and Tübingen. Born in Hamburg, she spent more than 20 years in New York City and now divides her time between Berlin and the small town of Millerton in Upstate New York. Her debut Mit der Flut (2017) was an instant success. After Sommergäste (2020), Leo und Dora (2022) is her third novel. Her selection and translation of mostly unknown stories by Willa Cather has been published from Die Andere Bibliothek in November 2023.

Nora Haddada (b. 1998, Neunkirchen/Saar) is a writer based between Paris and Berlin. She studied Creative Writing and Literature at the Hildesheim Literature Institute, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and Freie Universität Berlin. In addition to her literary work, she has worked as a screenwriter, curator, and cultural representative at the German Embassy in Paris. Her debut novel, Nichts in den Pflanzen, was published in 2024 by Ecco (HarperCollins), and her second book is forthcoming with S. Fischer in the fall of 2025. Haddada’s writing focuses on milieu studies and contemporary perceptions of love, admiration, and human connection.

Julian Shreddy Elbel (b. 2003) is a writer and artist based between Vienna and Munich. Since the winter semester of 2021, he has been studying Fine Arts at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München in the class of Peter Kogler. Elbel’s practice spans performance, photography, video, and text, often exploring the relationship between the body and different types of spaces. Working across mediums and materials, his work investigates how physical presence interacts with built, imagined, and emotional environments.

The work of Viktoria Binschtok counters our new digital world — a world of economic and mathematical calculation — with the experience of contingency.In so doing Binschtok sets out to filter the stream of phenomena with more clear-cut precision, extracting the paradoxes and distortions of our new world, a capitalist society geared to the media, consumption, and creating demand. The artist herself operates as a kind of search engine and, to preserve the subjectivity of her gaze, she takes care in choosing her filters.

Lena Henke (* 1982 in Warburg) is a German sculptor, photographer and installation artist. Henke has exhibited at the Kunsthalle Zürich, the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, the Bard Hessel Museum of Art, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and the 9th Berlin Biennale, among others.

Julia von Lucadou is a German writer b. Heidelberg 1982. She studied film and theater at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and Victoria University of Wellington. Lucadou received her doctorate from the University of Mainz in 2015 with a thesis on the work of director Atom Egoyan. Her debut novel “Die Hochhausspringerin” was nominated for the Swiss Book Prize 2018 and won the Swiss Literature Prize in the category “European Author Translated into French” in 2023.

Jonas Roßmeißl is developing his work according to a critical-emphatic analysis of social conditions. He questions prevailing concepts of the public sphere, identity and intimacy as well as the associated possibilities, conditions and forms of their representation: What is the state of the utopia of collectivity and political spaces of action under repressive systems and the influence of technology and rationalised reproduction in the present? What is the situation regarding vulnerability and empathy? Is there still a will and potential to break out and change? What could this look like?

Group of silent meditators that come for one month every year, they are organized through the Thomas Hübl field.

Die Sammlung is a collective for Jewish writers in Berlin. The group has been together since 2023, meeting bi-monthly to workshop and discuss each other’s texts, as well as the role of secular Jewish literature in Germany. Members: Siena Powers, Alex Cocotas, Tamar Raphael, Julia Bosson, Tomer Dreyfus, Sanders Bernstein, Allex Fassberg.

Sandra is a songwriter, producer, and performer. She has toured with her solo project 'Polar Noir' alongside bands such as M83 and Cari Cari, playing in Germany, Poland, Austria, and Denmark.

Nata Togliatti is an artist whose work ranges from painting and sculpture to social interventions and installations. Her work invites us to rethink our place in the world as part of a complex web of life. She sees her artistic task as creating connections, overcoming categorizations, and allowing boundaries to become fluid. She lives outside of Berlin with her two daughters and husband.

Gemma Mortensen is an award-winning social entrepreneur and thinker and practitioner interested in transformative, systemic change. She is Co-Founder and Vice-Chair of More In Common and a Trustee of Bite Back 2030 and The HALO Trust.

Seyi Akiwowo is a leading social entrepreneur and international advocate focused on creating ethical tech and tackling one of the world’s biggest issues-  online harms. With a proven track record in systemic change in tech policy, Seyi is passionate about demonstrating how responsible technology can drive meaningful impact for society, democracy as well as industry’s bottom line.

Polish, american, living in berlin. Aspiring astrologer, body worker, yoga teacher.

Niko Abramidis &NE (*1987 in Europe, lives and works in Berlin, DE) opens up a diverse spectrum in his art that deals with economic structures and visions of the future. In his drawings, paintings, sculptures and spatial installations, he creates parallel universes in which he creates fictitious corporate identities and appropriates forms of expression from the financial economy.

In Susi Gelb’s artistic cosmos, the boundaries between ecology and technology, the organic and the artificial, are blurred and ultimately dissolved. The artist oscillates between the concepts of control and chance, merging algorithm, randomness, entropy and material agency, to create environments that lead a certain life of their own.

Nick Meehan is a Berlin-based American artist, technologist, strategist, entrepreneur, exploring the significance of peace in shared direct experiences.

Info coming soon

Maximilian Oehl (b. 1988 in Cologne) is a German lawyer and social entrepreneur. He is co-founder and head of the Brand New Bundestag initiative, founding chairman of Refugee Law Clinics Germany and managing director of the agency Media Force. Oehl has been an Ashoka Fellow since 2022.

Zoë Claire Miller (*1984 in Boston) is an artist / curator / activist who lives and works in Berlin. Her work in sculpture and installation revolves around relationships between animals including humans and plants, as things that live, talk, smell, possess agency.

Raphael Danke (b. Aachen, Germany) graduated from the Kunsthochschule in Berlin in 1999. He is represented by Norma Mangione Gallery , Turin. Raphael Danke lives and works in Berlin.

Marko Dinic was born in Vienna in 1988 and spent his childhood and youth in Belgrade. He studied German language and literature and Jewish cultural history in Salzburg. His first novel "The Good Days" (Zsolnay, 2019), played out against a backdrop of the route between Belgrade and the German-speaking world. Dinic lives in Vienna.

The painterly practice of Rhineland-based artist Edie Monetti (b. 1986 in Munich, Germany) draws on her research into extremophilia, the history of the standardization of catastrophes, and the singularity of extreme states. In her often surreal and ambivalent pictorial inventions - oscillating between kitsch and pathos - she leads us into spaces that cannot be documented, which, as a metaphor, point to an uncertain present and a world that has been "fixed" by man.

Born 1985 in Dachau, Germany. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Almut Vogel studied fashion design but soon moved on towards styling. After working as fashion editor for Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, she decided to launch her career as a freelance fashion stylist and creative consultant. Since 2019 she lives in Berlin.