Boris Nikitin, born in Basel, Switzerland and the son of Ukrainian-Slovakian-French-Jewish immigrants, is a theatre director, author and curator of the biennial festival "It’s The Real Thing – Basel Documentary Platform".

For over thirteen years, his productions, texts and happenings have been dealing with the representation and production of identity and reality. They are border crossings between illusion theatre and performance, between documentary and propaganda. Nikitin's works, many of which tour internationally, are raw, frontal, yet always precisely composed and always searching for the boundaries and breaking points of the aesthetic. "Like few others, Boris Nikitin is currently leading theatre to a critical point," writes the German professional journal "Theater heute". The Zurich daily newspaper "Tagesanzeiger" writes: "The Basel director pushes the genre of documentary theatre to its limits." In his last plays and texts, Nikitin increasingly deals with the relationship between art and illness.