Live podcast with Prens Emrah at Doxumentale
Season Finale — Live at Doxumentale: A Conversation with Prens Emrah
Stories from the Beauty Parlor closes its first season where it belongs: in community, live, and on stage.
When we started this podcast, we asked a simple question: what stories live inside beauty parlors, salons, and the intimate spaces where women gather? Since then, our microphone has traveled — to Morocco, Georgia, Ukraine, Germany, Kosovo, and Istanbul — following the thread of solidarity, survival, and sisterhood across borders.
And now, for our season finale, we're bringing the podcast live.
Sunday 31.5 20:30 Doxumentale Festival. Podcast Lounge.
Our guest is someone whose life is itself an act of radical storytelling: Prens Emrah (she/he) — belly dancer, DJ, drag performer, make-up artist, and founder of the QueerBerg Collective, a BiPOC collective for queer refugee and other trans* artists and performers in Berlin. Haus der Kulturen der WeltQueerberg-collective
Born in Turkmenistan, Prens Emrah fled to Turkey and eventually to Germany in 2015 after their family and authorities discovered they were queer — facing the threat of imprisonment. In Berlin, they built something extraordinary: since founding QueerBerg in 2018, Prens Emrah has provided a support system for refugee artists both on stage and through everyday challenges — performing, curating festivals, parties, and solidarity events for the community. DeutschlandQueerberg-collective
As Prens Emrah has said of the collective: "We didn't emerge through funding. We began meeting up to form a kind of family in exile, to motivate and empower each other." Medium
They are also the creator of the Whoriental Festival and the Black & Brown Cabaret — spaces that center queer, migrant, and refugee artists who are too often relegated to the margins of Berlin's cultural life.
For us at Stories from the Beauty Parlor, Prens Emrah embodies everything this podcast is about: the beauty parlor as a site of refuge, reinvention, and radical care. A house mother. A community builder. An artist whose stage is also a shelter.
We can't think of a better way to close our first season.