Kerry Kyriacos Michael MBE
Kerry is a second generation North London Cypriot, a theatre and film director, producer and programmer with over twenty years of leading cultural organisations. He is Creative Director of Theatro Technis in Camden, and heads Kyriacos And Company, a UK production company making television, film and theatre.
Theatro Technis
Kerry has been Creative Director of Theatro Technis since June 2022, working alongside its founder George Eugeniou, who started the company in 1957 as the first and only professional theatre in Britain created by and for Cypriots.
He launched his inaugural season with The Ophiolite, Burnt Up Love and Love Omar, and has directed new work at the venue including Philip de Voni's play set between Cyprus and England. Tamasha Theatre Company, Gate Theatre and MENA Arts UK have come in as resident companies, and the building hosts Camden Fringe and Shubbak Festival alongside its own programme.
In 2025 he created WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE?, a seminar on British Cypriot representation in the arts, which returned for a second edition in November and closed with the first Cypriot open mic comedy night. It was a direct response to the near-absence of Cypriot characters and Cypriot voices from mainstream British television, theatre and press.
He also oversaw the programme Cyprus Week each July, a free six-day festival that has run at Theatro Technis for over fifty-five years, begun as a response by London Cypriots to the events of the 1950s and renewed with greater intensity after the coup and the invasion of 1974.
Kerry is now leading a redevelopment that will take the main auditorium from 120 seats to 300, with the capacity for live translation.
Home Theatre
Home Theatre began with a sabbatical in Brazil in 2012, where People's Palace Projects brokered a connection with Rio de Janeiro's Festival Home Theatre. Kerry brought it to Britain, and in 2013 and 2015 Theatre Royal Stratford East staged thirty performances simultaneously in thirty homes across London, each one made with and for the household hosting it. It has since been presented in Rio, Dublin and Pretoria.
In October 2024 Kerry led Home Theatre in Southampton with Southampton Forward. Artists and residents from all seventeen wards of the city co-designed performances about what it means to belong there, staged in the residents' own homes for audiences of their own friends and family. The theatre makers were trained in oral history practice before they began, working with oral historian Padmini Broomfield, and were paid for research and development as well as rehearsal.
Home Theatre is the spine of Kerry's practice: work co-created with people rather than about them, built from their own testimony, and given back to them in their own space.
MENA Arts UK
Kerry is a founder member and Chair of MENA Arts UK, formed in 2020 with the Palestinian-Libyan actor Ramzi Dehani. It exists for artists and professionals in the UK's live and recorded arts who have a connection to the Middle East, North Africa and the surrounding region, a definition that runs from Afghanistan and Armenia through Cyprus, Iran, Israel, Kurdistan, Lebanon and Palestine to Turkey.
The organisation was a response to a simple absence. A study of thirteen hundred popular films made between 2007 and 2019 found that MENA characters never rose above 3.4 per cent. MENA Arts UK set out to build a directory so nobody could claim they could not find the talent, to connect employers to that talent directly, and to lobby for proper representation.
Theatre Royal Stratford East
Kerry was Artistic Director and Chief Executive from September 2004 to September 2017. Over thirteen years he built the theatre's commitment to new work and to voices under-represented on the British stage.
Its hip-hop Pied Piper won an Olivier in 2007, the year the theatre's season was itself nominated for a powerful season of provocative work reaching new audiences. His Cinderella became the first pantomime ever nominated for an Olivier. Further nominations followed for You Me Bum Bum Train, Roadkill, Oh What A Lovely War and The Government Inspector. Tommy, in 2017, was an integrated production made with Deaf and disabled artists and fully accessible to all audiences.
He pioneered OPEN STAGE, where Stratford East became the first theatre in Britain to hand complete programming power to its audience, following eighteen months of public research with a six-month season programmed by the community in the run-up to the 2012 London Games. He also founded the International Festival for Emerging Artists and led the theatre's Musical Theatre Initiative, which worked with hundreds of composers and writers.
Recognition
Artistic Director of the Year, Off West End Awards, 2018. Freedom of the City of London, 2018. MBE for services to the Arts, Queen's Birthday Honours 2018. Honorary Fellow of Solent University, 2025. The Stratford East archive covering his tenure is now held at the British Library.
Boards
Chair of MENA Arts UK. Member of the Equity Council. Board member of the British Council's Arts Advisory Group.
More info: April 2018 Kerry is awarded the Freedom of the City of London.
More info: Kerry is recognised In the 2018 Queen's Birthday Honours List.
More info: Kerry's achievements at Theatre Royal Stratford East.
Whether people can be separated from the actions of the governments they live under is a question Kerry's work keeps returning to.