Titia Bouwmeester calls herself a theatre director, visual artist, project developer and generator of ideas. Her main drive is to stage meetings between people. She has been doing that for many years, as director, cook, artistic director of Dogtroep (between 1999 and 2003), and as a mother. Art, beauty and imagination are not ends in and of themselves, she believes, but means to make people more open and curious and to bring together different people (and people who are different).

Her strength lies in analyzing situations and inventing specific forms and solutions that go beyond an immediate problem. She prefers to work in places that are new to her, so that she, as an outsider, can offer a fresh look and a new perspective and where her work can become an added value. These places can be a neighborhood, a village, a psychiatric ward, any place that is alive and subject to change. She involves the people who live there, making them co-owner of the production. She is always looking for the unusual in the usual and for stories that move her, which she wants to share with a broad audience.

When she was artistic director of Dogtroep, the company produced shows in living locations like the Passengers Terminal in Amsterdam harbor, Bruges prison, Revolution Square in Moscow, and the construction site for a housing development in Leidsche Rijn under the smoke of Utrecht. In 2004, Titia founded 5e Kwartier together with Ted van Leeuwen, her partner and a musician and composer, to create community documentaries with social partners. Earlier in 2008 she and Ted completed ‘Binnenwereldbuiten’ [’inner world outside’] in the City of Delft and currently they are both working on a long-term project in the Slaughterhouse district of her hometown Haarlem.

National partner
5e Kwartier