Volkstheater's Samouil Stoyanov Wins Alfred Kerr Actor Award

The Volkshtheater has won another award at the 59th Berlin Theater Meeting. This year, the EUR 5,000 Alfred Kerr Actors' Prize goes to Volkstheater ensemble member Samouil Stoyanov for his performance in the production "humanistää!" directed by Claudia Bauer. (Claudia Bauer received 3rd prize for this.) Actress Valery Cheplanowa, juror for this year's Alfred Kerr Actors' Prize, made her decision after seeing the ten productions invited to the 59th Theatertreffen.

Born in Bulgaria, Samouil Stoyanov (*1989) grew up in Linz, where his parents run a ballet school. He grew up on stage as a dancer, musician and amateur actor. He received lessons in ballet, jazz dance, tap dance, flamenco and modern dance, and worked in the family's theater ballet school, MAESTRO, as a stage designer and lighting technician. After regular youth theater workshops at Wörthersee, where he worked with hearing-impaired children, he began studying acting at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna in 2011. After graduating, he received offers from 18 theaters and chose the Munich Kammerspiele, where he was a member from 2015 to 2020.
In 2018 he received the sponsorship award from the Friends of the Munich Kammerspiele, and, in the same year, the art sponsorship award in the "Performing Arts" category from the Bavarian state government. Samouil Stoyanov has been a member of the ensemble at the Volkstheater since the 2020/21 season.

The award ceremony took place on Sunday, May 22, at 2:30 p.m. in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele in the presence of Alfred Kerr's grandson, Sir Timothy Kerr, and his family, Dr. Deborah Vietor-English (President of the Alfred Kerr Foundation), Torsten Maß (Chairman of the Alfred Kerr Foundation), Valery Tscheplanowa (juror 2022), Prof. Dr. Peter von Becker (author, theater critic and cultural journalist, publishing house Der Tagesspiegel), Yvonne Büdenholzer (director of the Theatertreffen) and the participating Ulrich Matthes (actor).

The Alfred Kerr Actor Award was established in 1991 in memory of the Berlin theater critic Alfred Kerr by his children Judith and Michael Kerr together with the press foundation Tagesspiegel and the Berliner Festspiele/Theatertreffen and has since honored the outstanding performance of a young actor in one of the productions invited to the Theatertreffen. The prize is endowed with EUR 5,000 and is donated by the Alfred Kerr Foundation - with the support of the publishing house Der Tagesspiegel. A renowned theater personality alternates every year as a juror.

Samouil Stoyanov can currently be seen in the following productions at the Volkstheater:

humanistää!
an abolition of divisions
after Ernst Jandl
Directed by Claudia Bauer
May 25 + 28, 7:30 p.m

KAROLINE AND KASIMIR - NOLI ME TANGERE
to Ödön von Horváth
Directed by Nature Theater of Oklahoma
May 29, 7:30 p.m

To post a comment, you must register and login.