Ivo Dimchev is a theatre maker, choreographer, visual artist, singer-songwriter, and queer activist from Bulgaria. His work is an extreme and colorful mix of performance art, dance, theater, music, painting, and photography. He is the author of more than 40 stage performances and has received numerous international awards for dance and theater. Most of his stage performances are inluded in his book Stage Works 2002-2016. He has also written more than 100 original songs all included in his Songbook. His work has been presented throughout Europe, South and North America, and Asia.
Since November 2023 Ivo Dimchev is Artist in residence at La Mama theatre in New York, where he created and premiered his last stage works Hell/Top 40 and METCH.
During the Covid pandemic Dimchev performed more than 400 private concerts in people’s homes in Bulgaria, Istanbul, New York, and Los Angeles. The New Yorker covered these performances in a profile on Dimchev titled The Extravagant Exuberance of Ivo Dimchev.
Dimchev is the founder and director of Bulgaria’s Humarts Foundation. In 2009, after doing his master’s studies on performing arts at Dasarts Academy in Amsterdam, he opened Volksroom in Brussels, a performance space that presents young international artists. In 2014, he opened MOZEI in Sofia, Bulgaria, as an independent space for presenting contemporary art and music. In addition to his artistic work, Dimchev gives master classes at the National Theater Academy (Budapest), the Royal Dance Conservatorium of Belgium (Antwerp), Hochschule der Künste (Bern), Amsterdam University of the Arts, and DanceWeb (Vienna), among others.