Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian Spring 2025

Art After Dark

Spring Edition 2025

Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian PhD (she/they) is an award-winning designer of experiences, creative director, and director with over a decade of experience working to build platforms that support plurality, the creation of organised communities and 'impossible' productions, public events, expeditions, and projects with socio-political impacts. Uncategorisable, she is also a filmmaker, radio host, keynote speaker, amateur boxer and the author and director of five feature-length movies. She is the founder and director of the International Space Orchestra the world’s first orchestra of NASA space scientists and astronauts; and the founder of the tuition-free university - University of the Underground - which includes board members and activists like Prof. Noam Chomsky, Pussy Riot and Prof. Arjun Appadurai, this tuition-free educative and cultural program is supporting plurality of thinking, free and transnational teaching and unconventional practices in the basement of nightclubs since 2017.Her large-scale projects have included collaborations with political activists and artists like Massive Attack and Kid Cudi, The Avalanches to name a few.

She is known for challenging institutions from within through events, and she has done so at the United Nations, NASA, International Academy of Astronautics, or the International Astronautical Federation amongst many others. Nelly also has two doppelgangers who work with her to appear at multiple places at the same time, a Barbie doll and a Lego made of herself. Her new feature documentary Doppelgängers³, (SXSW 2024) is a freewheeling filmic essay/ documentary which takes questions of genders, history and free thinking to the frontiers of space exploration; it will have its UK premiere in June 2025.