LEAH GAYER (Germany/UK)

Leah Gayer (1995) is a British-German actor and performance maker whose practice moves between theatre, live art and socially engaged performance. She is interested in performance as a space of encounter: between bodies, cultures, places, and ways of knowing.

Leah is the Co-founder and Artistic Director of the award-winning refugee arts charity Compass Collective, where she has spent the past seven years developing creative practices with young refugees and asylum seekers. Her work with Compass has shaped a deep commitment to co-creation, collective authorship and culturally responsive practice, while also leading her to question the assumptions embedded within conventional Western models of theatre-making. She is particularly interested in how different cultural dramaturgies, storytelling traditions and embodied forms of knowledge can coexist without being assimilated into a single artistic language.

At the heart of Leah’s work is the practice of relation. She is interested in bringing together artists from different disciplines, cultural backgrounds, experiences. She is occupied with the question of what can emerge through dialogue across difference: the conflicts, misunderstandings, discoveries, intimacies and new perspectives that become possible when people genuinely meet one another. Increasingly, she sees these relationships not simply as the context for making work, but as part of the artistic material itself. She asks what it might mean to practise an ‘art of relations’ – to attend to how we listen, exchange, host, participate and care for one another, and to explore the shifting space between performer and non-performer, artist and participant, individual and collective. Her work seeks to create encounters in which no one person or perspective is fixed as the centre, and where the relationship itself can become a place of discovery.

Place and encounter are also central to her practice. Through international residencies and collaborations, she has become increasingly interested in entering into the intelligence of a place rather than arriving with a methodology to impose upon it. Her recent work in Italy and Estonia has explored community, memory, ritual, landscape and the relationship between the intimate and the collective. This has led her towards forms that sit between performance, installation, encounter and participatory practice, often questioning where a performance begins and ends, and what remains afterwards.

Alongside her performance practice, Leah writes for theatre and works as a dramaturg and facilitator. Her play Over Mum’s Dead Body was shortlisted for the Papatango Playwriting Prize. Represented by the Eamonn Bedford Agency, her acting credits include Alys Always (Bridge Theatre, dir. Nicolas Hytner), Macbeth (Chichester Festival Theatre), Prizefighters (Camelot Films), Doc Martin (ITV), Bloodmoon (HBO) and Doctors (BBC).

As Artistic Director of Compass Collective, Leah has led more than sixty creative projects and collaborations with major cultural institutions including Shakespeare’s Globe, Barbican, Leeds Playhouse, Somerset House, Tate, BAFTA and Southwark Playhouse. Compass has worked with more than 1,000 young refugees and asylum seekers and reached audiences of over 500,000. Her international practice includes projects across Europe and the Middle East.

Projects with CPPM

CPPM TRIPTYCH: Night Watch (2026) · Valga/Valka: Space × Architecture × Performance (2026) · CPPM LÄBU: A Second Silence Even Denser (2025) · CPPM LÄBU: After the Tower of Babel (2025) · CPPM LÄBU: Bog Roll (2025) · CPPM LÄBU: Southern Drawl (2025) · Here We Are (2025) · CPPM EXPROMT 1.1 · 1.2 · 1.3 · 1.4 · 2.1 · 2.2 · (Double Bill) (2025)

Contact

Website  ·  Instagram  ·  leahgayer.carrd.co  ·  leahrose.gayer@eamt.ee