We aim to create a sustainable professional support network that contributes to further development within the independent performing arts scene. Migrant knowledge and expertise are to be made more visible, and networks of solidarity strengthened. The program focuses on the exchange of knowledge, navigating the professional environment, and the development of individual career paths.

The mentoring program actively contributes to a necessary development in Hamburg’s independent performing arts scene, benefiting all artists in the field. In a society shaped by diversity, it is essential to design artistic structures in ways that incorporate different perspectives, experiences, and working methods.

The program creates a space in which migrant artists are not only supported but also actively contribute to the development of the scene. Through the exchange between established artists with migration experience and/or an international family background and newly arrived artists, sustainable networks are formed that foster greater diversity in the long term. These structures generate new artistic impulses, encourage alternative ways of working, and make the independent scene more adaptable and resilient.

The program offers an important opportunity: it helps to better understand the specific challenges faced by migrant artists and to actively integrate their perspectives into cultural policy processes. By initiating new collaborations, dismantling barriers, and making existing networks more accessible, a transformative process is created that enriches and develops the cultural landscape beyond Hamburg’s independent scene.

We understand mentoring not as a one-way flow of knowledge, but as a mutual exchange of experiences and resources that strengthens both mentors and mentees.

Yolanda Gutiérrez, born in Mexico, is a Hamburg-based choreographer, video artist, curator, and producer. She has been collaborating with Kampnagel since 2010. Her projects have been presented at international festivals such as Theater der Welt, JULIDANS, Membrane Festival, DIE IRRITIERTE STADT, and Find the File.

She works with dancers, actors, wrestlers, musicians, DJs, composers, amateurs, students, costume designers, and set designers from Europe, Asia, Latin America, the United States, and Africa.

Since 2017, she has been regularly choreographing decolonizing audio walks with dance interventions, presented under the titles URBAN BODIES PROJECT and DECOLONYICITIES. She will continue to develop her newly founded platform SHAPE THE FUTURE in the coming years.

A central focus of her work is the question of what political role the body plays in art, and how an artistic movement can become a political one.

Melike Bilir is the founder and curator of Galerie Melike Bilir in Hamburg. The gallery is a curatorial project dedicated to international positions in contemporary art and performance.

She is the Artistic Director and Managing Director of Hajusom, where she develops transdisciplinary formats. A key focus of her work is international networking and exchange on questions of transculturality.

In 2025 and 2026, she was a fellow of the Cultural Leadership Program at the University of Music and Theatre Hamburg. Since 2025, she has been working as a co-researcher in the project dialoguing@rts at the Institute of European Ethnomusicology at the University of Cologne.

Fernanda Ortiz is a dancer and choreographer. She works and researches at the intersection of dance, art, and digitality. Her multimedia and interactive choreographies combine political and social phenomena with fiction and reality.

Fernanda Ortiz was born in Argentina and comes from a family with a migration background: on her father’s side, she is of Guaraní (Ava) descent from Paraguay, an Indigenous community, and on her mother’s side, of Spanish origin. She is the mother of two children. Since 2014, she has been living and working in Hamburg.

As a PoC artist with an Indigenous biography and as a non-European, female-socialized person, her intersectional perspective and critical engagement with hegemonic power structures are central to her artistic practice.

Mimi Harder is a producer, curator, and creative director based in Hamburg, Germany. Through her work, she creates platforms - ranging from exhibitions to festivals - that foster intercultural dialogue. She organizes ‘Safer Spaces’ for BIPOC: socially secure environments where marginalized individuals can express themselves freely, network, and empower one another.

Her recent work includes the co-production of the Kaleidoskop-Award at Kampnagel, serving as production lead for the piece ‘Opera of Hope’, and the conception and curation of the exhibition ‘Thank You for Thanking Me Now’, presented at the Altonaer Museum in 2025. As a curator, she engages with non-Western archival methods and narratives, focusing on Black life in the diaspora and the challenges of defining identity.