Boris Nikitin, born in Basel and son of Ukrainian-Slovakian-French-Jewish immigrants, is a director, author and essayist. He is also the initiator and artistic director of the biennial festival "It's The Real Thing - Basler Dokumentartage" in Basel.

Nikitin's theater works, texts and festivals have been dealing with the representation and production of identity and reality since 2007. The plays and texts are border crossings between illusion theater and performance, between document and its falsification. In his most recent projects, Nikitin is increasingly concerned with the relationship between illness, vulnerability and art.

In the 18/19 season, as part of a non-fictional propaganda talk series, he conducted a monthly conversation with a selected personality on the subject of "Power and Vulnerability". Guests included Didier Eribon, Milo Rau, Dean Hutton, Peggy Piesche, Christian Weissgerber, Abbot Peter of Sury and the euthanasia organization EXIT.

For his complete works Nikitin was awarded the J.M.R. Lenz - Drama Prize of the City of Jena in 2017. Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Professor of Theater Studies at the Goethe University Frankfurt, writes in his laudation: "It is the hidden possibilities, a potentiality that remains in the space of the possible, for whose sake Nikitin builds up his experimental arrangements. His theater invites us to think in the existing beyond the existing as well as its negation beyond what may come: Different from what we expect, critical in every sense, without reason, may be gauche, in any case beyond the known.

In 2020 Nikitin was awarded the Swiss Theatre Prize.