Alina Serban is a Roma film and theater actress and writer. Serban is known for writing and performing plays with social justice messages, against sexism, racism, homophobia and various other forms of discrimination
Biography
Alina Serban was born in 1987 in a Romanian Roma family in Bucharest, Romania. She was 8 years old when her parents lost their home and were forced to move to her father’s extended family. A few years later her mother went to prison and Alina spent her teenage years in a children's home from where she went directly to the university. She used her diaries from those years to write the early versions of I Declare at My Own Risk – Slumdog Roma and Two weeks, maximum one month, maybe six years – which she performed at the International Romani Art Festival in 2009 and 2010 In 2011 Serban received a scholarship and moved to London for a master’s program at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. The following year she received the "Best Romanian Student in the UK”, prize, but she could not afford the expenses associated with the trip from London to Edinburgh so she could not pick up the prize in person. In March 2014the actress was invited to the Street Child World Cup to give a speech in front of 2000 people at Royal Albert Hall. In 2016 Alina Serban published the first Collection of Roma Fairy Tales in Romania, as told by her aunt – Tanti Veta. Currently she has projects in Romania, UK, Belgium, and Germany, including two feature films in which she will play the main character.
Alina Serban became known on the alternative theater scene of Bucharest after the performance I Declare at My Own Risk, a one-woman-show she had also written. The play, inspired by the autobiographical story of the actress, was performed in many European countries, including Romania, Hungary, France and Italy In 2013 Alina Serban performed I Declare at My Own Risk in Great Britain, at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art – RADA Festival, followed by another performance at Tara Arts in 2014 While Living in London, in 2015, Alina Serban wrote “Home”, a play that tells a story of different immigrants looking for a better life in the UK. The play won “Stories of London” Rich Mix's competition By the end of 2015, Serban performed in “Roma-Sapiens” in Berlin and was invited to present and perform I Declare at My Own Risk at the Stockholm Literature Festival In 2016 Alina Serban writes, directs and performs in “The Great Shame”, a theater play that talks about 500 years of Roma slavery in the Romanian countries and in which she includes little known stories of slavery from historical documents
