MIGRATION DIARY. NEW YORK CITY EDITION to Have World Premiere at La MaMa
Director Carmen Lidia Vidu's multimedia work features performers Sam Xu, Lia Fietz, Ana-Maria Bandean, and Ellen Ko.
This June, the legendary La Mama Experimental Theatre Club will welcome the world premiere of Migration Diary. New York City Edition, a new theatrical collaboration with the Romanian Cultural Institute and The National Theatre of Bucharest. Created by award-winning Romanian director Carmen Lidia Vidu, Migration Diary. New York City Edition is a raw, visually immersive, new multimedia theater experience, running June 25 - 28, 2026.
Presented by La MaMa in collaboration with the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, the production brings real lives to the stage inside one of the world's most influential homes of experimental theater. No invented characters. No fictional dialogue. Just the stories people carry across borders.
Built through an extensive documentary process of interviews, personal archives, video diaries, and autobiographical testimony, Migration Diary continues the groundbreaking artistic method Vidu created more than a decade ago for her internationally acclaimed Diary of Romania (Jurnal de România) series, presented across Europe at major festivals and theaters. Performed by Sam Xu, Lia Fietz, Ana-Maria Bandean, and Ellen Ko, the show follows women whose lives passed through Romania, China, Germany, Portugal, Singapore, London, Moscow, and finally New York — and asks the question this city has always asked, and never fully answered: what does it mean to stay?
Blending live performance with haunting multimedia created by visual artist Sabina Costinel and media designer Constantin Șimon, the production transforms documentary footage, family archives, childhood photographs, digital collage, and projected imagery into a living landscape of memory, displacement, reinvention, and belonging.
Urgent, intimate, and deeply contemporary, Migration Diary. New York City Edition speaks directly to New York's immigrant soul — and to everyone who has ever left one life behind to begin another.
Performers include Sam Xu, Lia Fietz, Ana-Maria Bandean and Ellen Ko.
The production team includes Carmen Lidia Vidu (Concept, Research, Script & Artistic Director), Sabina Costinel (Multimedia Production), Constantin Șimon (Media Design) and Lizhen Mei (Styling).
La MaMa's The Club is located at 74A East 4th Street in New York City. Performances are Thursday at 7:30pm, Friday at 7:30pm, Saturday at 6:30pm and Sunday at 3pm. Run time is approximately 75 minutes. Post-show reception on Thu 6/25 and post-show Q&A with the artistic team on Sat 6/27. Tickets are $30 (adults) and $25 (students and seniors). First ten tickets to every performance are $10 (limit 2 per person).
