Anthony Nikolchev is the co-artistic director of The Useless Room, a movement-based experimental performance group in Los Angeles, USA, and is on the faculty at CalArts. He grew up in California’s Bay Area and holds a dual bachelor’s degree in Theater and an interdisciplinary degree in Bioethics from Wesleyan University. He spent his 20s working between Central Europe (Poland), the US (Chicago, Los Angeles), and the UK. He is an award-winning, critically acclaimed performer between dance and theater, film and live, including writing and directing projects that range from his solo work to major experiential commercial campaigns.
He has performed alongside legendary dancers, Julie Shanahan, Julie Stanzak, and Jo Endicott from the Pina Bausch Tanztheater, his original adaption of Dostoevsky’s The Double, at the 2025 Venice Biennale (Italy), his self-generated solo performances, Look, What I Don’t Understand, (a “tour de force” by the LA Times critics and Best Actor at New York City’s United SOLO Festival) and The Echoes Off The Walls Underground Are Louder Than Your Footsteps Above Me, (a second award of Best Actor at United SOLO in NYC) which toured Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Moscow, Poland, and Central Europe/Asia, the site-specific critically acclaimed, The Day Shall Declare It, in London and Los Angeles directed by Annie Saunders and Sleep No More’s original Lady Macbeth, Sophie Bortolussi, as well as frequently collaborations with Vivien Wood - a longtime dancer with DV8. On film, he has been on many festival screens, including at the Settimana Internazionale della Critica in Venice’s Biennale Cinema and the Amazon experimental animation series, Undone.
His performance company, The Useless Room, has toured Europe, Asia, and the US, including commissions by DanceCity in Newcastle, UK, and presentations at the Venice Biennale, Summerhall at Edinburgh Fringe, and London’s Ovalhouse Theatre. Anthony and The Useless Room have led movement-based workshops for performers around the world, from Warsaw to Mexico to the USA to India. He is on the director roster for the experiential commercial production company HELO, for which he directs major branded live events.
Anthony is published by the Saint Petersburg Theatre Journal (Russia), and the Claremont College Mime Journal, and excerpts of his text for the performance, Exile, directed by Vivien Wood, are published in Celtic Daily Prayers (HarperCollins). He has lectured on the topic of “Human Rights and Political Theater” at St. Petersburg’s Smolny University, was a guest speaker at the 2017 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity with his partner Gema Galiana and collaborator Annie Saunders from Wilderness, and has been commissioned to create a new work by the Skirball Center in Los Angeles.
