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

 

I’m an actor and writer, a cross-continental gender-bender who enjoys making audiences feel a little bit uncomfortable.

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I work across stage and screen in my hometown of São Paulo and my second home, Berlin, having performed at theaters such as Ballhaus Ost, Volksbühne, and Maxim Gorki, and appearing in films and TV shows including Colônia (2026), The Trouble Out There (2024), and Last Call Blue (2024, winner of Next Generation Short Tiger Award).

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In the fall of 2021, I was the literary resident of Goyki3 Art Inkubator, where I wrote the pilot of Brutes, a queer fantasy Western. The TV series was nominated for the Pretty Original Award at the 2023 Seriencamp Conference. That same year, I was a finalist of the Berlin TV Series Festival, pitching the dramedy Silver Future, based on my experiences in Berlin's underground Drag scene. In 2025, I returned to Seriencamp to pitch the surreal romcom series Erika, about the German icon Erika Mustermann.

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I'm a recipient of the 2017 Tim Disney Prize for Excellence in Storytelling Arts, as well as fellowships from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Akademie der Künste, LABA Berlin, Fonds Darstellende Künste and flausen+. I hold a BFA in Acting with a minor in Creative Writing from California Institute of the Arts, and am an alumnus of Torino Film Lab, Serial Eyes (Diverse Storytelling Workshop), and the National Theater Institute.

 

Currently, I’m developing Treif, a Brazilian series about my Sephardic Jewish immigrant family, alongside my debut feature film Geographic Tongues, in which I’ll also play the lead role. You can also catch me performing in the bars and cabarets of Berlin as my drag king alter ego Mojo, the Sword Swallower of Switzerland.

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