Alina was born in 1987, in Bucharest, to Roma parents, and spent four years in foster care. She is a graduate of the Romanian National University for Performing Arts, UNATC, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in acting. Also in 2009 she completed a one-semester acting course at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Despite her young age, she has engaged in various acting and performance projects, both in Romania and abroad, some of which being actually produced and managed by the actress herself.

While last year Alina developed for the festival an interactive and intimate artistic experiment, that recreated with the help of the audience the main coordinates of her early years spent in a Roma community of spoitori (pot makers), this year she will be re-transposing the show into a new artistic form, putting together a collaborative artistic team – playwright, director – and with their help re-evaluating her story as to turn it from an artistic experiment to a true play.

Her sincere and impressive discourse that described us her journey towards acknowledging her ethnicity, and the way her feelings towards it turned around, from an inferiority complex into a personal value to cherish and uphold is developing into a new full artistic endeavor, that apart the authenticity of the first-hand experience is also bringing forth two main messages, as the artist puts it: “I want to develop the performance to achieve the main purpose of the show – to make the majority learn more about the minority, while exposing it to my own journey, as both an insider and an outsider carrying prejudices. I also want to bring forth the other message, directed at the minority, which is that education matters, that the hard work to stay in school brings about opportunity, as from the poor courtyard I lived in I managed to go to university and even study in 2009 at the topmost US university in performing arts, The Tisch School Of The Arts at New York University”.