Juliano Mer-Khamis
جوليانو مير خميس
Actor and founder of the Freedom Theatre in Jenin
Actor and director who founded the Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp and was assassinated outside it in 2011.
Juliano Mer-Khamis was born in Nazareth in 1958, the son of Arna Mer, a Jewish Israeli activist, and Saliba Khamis, a Palestinian Christian intellectual. During the first intifada his mother founded a children’s theatre in the Jenin refugee camp — work he later chronicled in the documentary Arna’s Children (2004), co-directed with Danniel Danniel, which won Best Documentary Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival. Himself one of the region’s leading actors on stage and screen, he described his identity simply in a 2009 interview: “I am 100 percent Palestinian and 100 percent Jewish.”
In 2006, together with Zakaria Zubeidi — a former commander of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades in Jenin — Jonatan Stanczak, and others, Mer-Khamis founded the Freedom Theatre in the heart of the refugee camp, offering acting training, productions, and cinema workshops to the camp’s young people as a form of what he called cultural resistance. On 4 April 2011, a masked gunman shot him dead in his car outside the theatre, in view of his infant son. The killing was condemned across Palestine and beyond; it remains unsolved. The theatre he built continues to work in the camp today.
Selected contributions
- Co-founder of the Freedom Theatre, Jenin refugee camp (2006)
- Co-director of the documentary Arna’s Children (2004)
- Acting career in Palestinian and Israeli film and theatre
Sources
Further reading
An external biography or archive holding more on this life than the entry above.