Biography

Alisa Khazanova is a theatre and film actor, film director, screenwriter and producer. As of May 2024, she is based in London and has a number of international projects in development.

Alisa started her career as a Bolshoi ballet soloist and performed in a wide range of classical repertoire: Swan Lake, Spartacus, Don Quixote, Capriccio and The Golden Age among many others. She is a graduate of Martha Graham School of Modern Dance in New York, has her two degrees as Ballet Dancer and Choreographer from the Moscow State Academy of Choreography, and was offered a scholarship to study at the Juilliard School. She's also made her mark as a choreographer, receiving the Grand Prix at the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet choreography competition in St. Petersburg.

Having quit professional ballet after a serious knee injury, Alisa reinvented herself as an actor in film and theatre. In 2005 she made her acting debut in Nikolai Khomeriki's La Cinefondation award-winning short film Together, closely followed by his features 977 and Tale in the Darkness (both films featured in the 'Un Certain Regard' programme of the Cannes Film Festival). In 2012, James Watkins' The Woman in Black marked her first appearance in an English-language film. Throughout her career, Alisa starred in films by award-winning independent directors, including Nikolai Dostal, Renata Litvinova, Pavel Loungine, Valeria Gai Germanika, Pavel Ruminov, Grigory Konstantinopolsky, Anna Melikyan.

In theatre, Alisa is known for her one-woman shows, such as Agata Returns Home (Praktika Theatre) and Shining (The Stanislavsky Electrotheatre). In 2018 she appeared on stage in London in The Girl and Death, directed by Maxim Didenko. Since 2022, she has been performing in The Last Word, also directed by Didenko, and based on Alisa's original idea: a production centering around the final statements of women accused of political crimes in Russian courts, the last remnants of free speech in Russia. Having premiered in Berlin's Gorki Theatre, The Last Word has toured internationally in Potsdam, Dresden, Princeton University and Tel Aviv.

Alisa co-wrote and directed her first feature film, the indie drama Middleground, released theatrically in 2017. Shot in New York, entirely in English, it featured an international cast and a lead performance by Alisa. Her second feature, The White List, a procedural drama loosely based on the real-life events surrounding the police investigation of a teenage suicide game controversy, was co-written, co-produced and directed by Alisa, and released theatrically in autumn 2023.
- IMDb mini biography by: Alisa Khazanova