Nadja Kostich is the Artistic Director and CEO of St Martins Youth Arts Centre. Over the past seven years, the works she has created here with our young people and amazing creative teams have garnered an extraordinary number of industry awards and nominations: five Green Room Awards, ten Green Room Award nominations, a Melbourne Fringe Best Live Art Award, a GLOBE Award nomination for Outstanding Community Advocacy, as well as five-star and four-star reviews.
An interdisciplinary artist working in an inimitably collaborative style, Nadja’s integration of physical score, text, video, music, installation and digital components has produced powerful and moving experiences for audiences in theatres, public spaces and festivals for over two decades.
Most recently, Gene Tree: Listen. Now. Again won Green Room Awards for Best Production and Best Composition in 2023 and was nominated for Best Ensemble in the Independent Category. Nadja received a Green Room Award in 2020 for Best Direction of St Martins’ Balit Liwurruk: Strong Girl, which also garnered the Ensemble GRAA and four further nominations. She conceived and directed St Martins’ For The Ones Who Walk Away, winning the 2017 Melbourne Fringe Best Live Art Award and a Green Room Award for Design. This large-scale, immersive, site-specific performance featured over 60 children and teens across 14 rooms and spaces at SITEWORKS, receiving 5-star reviews and public acclaim. Nadja conceived and directed the heralded film project Escape Velocity, comprising eight short films in collaboration with Minus18 and gender-diverse young people. Escape Velocity received a GLOBE nomination for Outstanding Community Advocacy and over 1 million views online.
A VCA graduate, Nadja received a Green Room Award nomination for Best Direction for her debut production, InsideOut, as Artistic Director of the Brunswick Women’s Theatre, followed by a Green Room Award for Best Production for The Grand Feeling as Co-Artistic Director of paradigm productions/small revolutions.
Nadja directed Test Pattern by Angus Cerini (2 Green Room Awards) and Tenderness: Ugly and Slut, by Christos Tsiolkas and Patricia Cornelius (2 Awgie Awards). She directed Mari Lourey’s Bear Witness at Fortyfivedownstairs, followed by a national tour.
Nadja was the creative producer for the Light in Winter at Fed Square for three years alongside AD Robyn Archer.
She was a cultural ambassador in the Melbourne Theatre Company Connect program, advocating for the visibility of artists from diverse cultures in the arts.
Get in touch: nadja@stmartinsyouth.com.au
