STUDIO GARAGE
STUDIO GARAGE
Studio Garage was founded in 2024 in New Jersey by Nadir Sarıbacak and Ayhan Hulagu. The company began its work by offering acting classes and later adapted The Ugly Duckling from Andersen's fairy tales into their own theatrical language of narrative theater. Inspired by Peter Brook’s concept of the “empty space,” Studio Garage designs performances that remove the fourth wall between actor and audience, creating storytelling-driven plays that speak directly to the viewer. Their work prioritizes building imaginative worlds through storytelling, puppetry, and the use of objects, engaging and activating the audience's imagination throughout the performance.
Nadir Sarıbacak
Nadir Sarıbacak is a professional actor and director. He studied Turkish Literature at the University of Çanakkale and worked as a teacher in Istanbul in order to be in a big city to develop his acting career. It was there that he joined the Semaver Kumpanya theater company, where he began performing on stage and deepening his commitment to the craft. Sarıbacak continued his training at Bahçeşehir University, where he received his Master’s in Acting.
His career took off after he starred in the film Uzak İhtimal (2009), for which he received numerous Best Actor awards at festivals, including the International Film Festival TOFIFEST and the Istanbul International Film Festival. He later appeared in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. For his role in the Sundance World Cinema-nominated film Ivy (2015), he received the Best Actor award at the Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival, as well as several others. The artist, who has appeared in several TV series such as Şubat and Five Brothers, is currently working on theater and film projects that he writes and directs.
Nadir moved to New York City in 2017 and continued his acting career in the United States.
Ayhan Hulagu
Ayhan Hulagu is a New York-based actor. After obtaining his college degree, he joined the Sahika Tekand Studio Players in Istanbul. Hulagu brought his artistic experience to the U.S. and founded the US Karagoz Theatre Company in 2017. His shows have been seen in nearly 40 states across the U.S., and he organized masterclass workshops and exhibitions to win new fans and audiences for Turkish Theatre at international festivals and universities. Hulagu has been a guest artist at multiple universities, including Cornell, UC Berkeley, Princeton, MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. He directed a postdoctoral project about American folktale in Anatolian theatre at the University of California, Irvine, Department of Drama. A master's thesis was written at the Shanghai Theatre Academy on a Shakespeare adaptation.
He brought Don Quixote, Hamlet, Stories of Dede Korkut, and 1001 Nights Tales to traditional Turkish theatre for the first time. He received invitations from several organizations to perform, such as the National Puppet Festival, Neopolis International Theatre Festival, and Hollywood & New York Fringe Festival. He frequently receives such invitations from similar organizations in the U.S., Asia, Africa, and Europe. He made history as the first artist to introduce traditional Anatolian theatre, in its nearly 700 years of history, to Broadway and Hollywood.