Fabian Holle
Fabian’s educational path started at the HKU (University of the Arts Utrecht, Netherlands), from where they graduated in 2004 as an actor/theatre maker. While working in performing arts, they have worked with various directors, choreographers, as well as won and were nominated for several awards – including a nomination for an art carnation from the Prins Bernhard Cultuur Fonds. A year after graduating from HKU, Fabian and their colleagues co-founded a theatre collective, Ponies, which was active for the next ten years, producing and performing various collective and individual projects.
Fabian’s creative spirit expanded beyond the borders of the professional and official cultural world through their drag alter ego – Massiah Carey. Besides, they co-organised and hosted, but also DJed at numerous clubbing/nightlife events devoted to creating safer spaces of expression for LGBTQ+ communities.
Years later, Holle decided to channel their interests to academia. In 2020, they graduated cum laude from Vrije Universiteit (VU) in Amsterdam as a Master of Sociology. Under the supervision of Halleh Ghorashi, Fabian’s thesis focused on the role of art in queer refugees’ lives in The Netherlands, and was awarded with the ARC-GS Master Thesis Prize 2020.
The core of Fabian Holle’s research includes community engaged scholarship with LGBTQ+ refugees/migrants in The Netherlands, and the ways of co-creating with these communities, as well as artists and organisers. Fabian continued researching on this topic by starting his PhD studies at the same University in March 2021. Their research is part of the Engaged Scholarship and Narratives of Change project supervised by Halleh Ghorashi, and it is associated with the Refugee Academy (VU) network. Together with these two projects, and Framer Framed, they are organizing LIMBO Workshops, a project welcoming all queer people with refugee background who participate in creative workshops hosted by numerous artists and activists.
In 2022 he initiated LIMBO: Engaged scholarship and queer exilic narratives, a creative research collaboration between Framer Framed, Refugee Academy (VU Amsterdam), Choices Support Center and queer/refugee/migrant community organisers & artists. This collaboration aimed to co-create meaningful knowledge on the challenges and resilience of queer refugees and the role of community engaged scholarship.
- Sociologist Fabian Holle promotes inclusion of refugees with LIMBO
- Read: Exilic (Art) Narratives of Queer Refugees Challenging Dominant Hegemonies