Hi! I'm Zero Pilnik (they/er/elu)

 

I'm a gender-bending, accordion-playing storyteller. As an actor and writer I aim to provoke audiences by breaking taboos and subverting norms.

I was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, where the coffee is strong and so are the women. My mother was a ballerina and my grandmother was a pianist, so I have been on stage my whole life. A nomad at heart, I've lived in California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Český Krumlov, and Berlin – where I have been based since 2018, acting in and writing for both theater and film/TV.

 

Recent projects include: Eldorado - Everything the Nazis Hate (Netflix doc), The Trouble Out There (Short film), Gasoline Queen (Ballhaust Ost), and 27 Club (Wein Salon, Framed) – my imagined rock'n'roll funeral, developed with support from Fonds Darstellende Künste and LABA: a Laboratory for Jewish Culture. In the fall of 2021 I was a literary resident of Goyki3 Art Inkubator, where I wrote the pilot of Brutes, a queer dystopian Western TV series. The show was nominated for the "Pretty Original" Award, selected for a live pitch at the 2023 Seriencamp Conference and is currently under option. My other series, the dramedy Silver Future (WT), was one of the "Pitch-Your-Pilot" finalists at the Berlin TV Series Festival 2023. The same year, I partook in the Series Lab Talents program from TorinoFilmLab, later pitching at the European Film Market during the 2024 Berlinale. You can also catch me performing regularly in the bars and cabarets of Berlin as my drag king alter ego Mojo, the Sword Swallower of Switzerland.

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I'm a recipient of the 2017 Tim Disney Prize for Excellence in Storytelling Arts for my original play People Who Love Move Mountains, as well as fellowships from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe (2023), Akademie der Künste (2021), LABA Belin (2021), and flausen+ Young Artists in Residency (2020). I hold a BFA in Acting with a minor in Creative Writing from California Institute of the Arts, and am an alumnus from the National Theater Institute.

 

In 2024 I'm writing Treif, a series about my Sephardic Jewish immigrant family, and am currently in the writers' room of DFFB/Serial Eyes' Diverse Storytelling in Digital Short Form Series program.