Åsa was born in 1963 in the small town of Tranås, Småland. She moved to Gothenburg in 1993. After many years in the Haga and Linné districts, she now lives just outside the city, in Jonsered.

The foundation of her artistic practice lies in a deep and strong commitment to an inclusive and equal society. Humor, politics, and music are her tools for creating a scenic expression in the works she engages with. In recent years, she has increasingly focused on performing arts rooted in reality. She enjoys digging even deeper to create directly “fact-based performance art.”

Åsa comes from and is trained in a tradition of co-creation. In recent years, she has been interested in exploring the role of director. Rather than assigning all “power” to one person, she invites a collaborative directorial process. It’s a shared direction led by a multi-headed artistic team—where she gathers a cluster of experienced artistic collaborators and, through a kind of workshop format, chisels out the material and eventually a co-directed result. She is the driving force and the one most familiar with the material, the one who stands on stage, yet she is guided and challenged by the artistic cluster’s contributions along the way.

She believes—both from personal experience and from having directed others—that when it comes to comedy on stage, the most important thing is to build and maintain trust in the room. This trust allows the performance to become secondary, and the presentation—presence and content—to take center stage.

After that, she can, for example as a comedian, choose to perform based on her specific abilities. “The essence is the presence.” In her case, it may involve shifting between sorrow and laughter, speaking truths with confidence, moving between perspectives and none at all, roller-skating, breaking into painfully expressive harmonica playing, singing beautifully about grief with humor, looping bass harmonica and crying out in a lament-song. Perhaps she even lets her clown and very first stage persona, Hyacynthia, speak—climbing onto her Ellen Key stool and delivering a speech, if she arrives in the dress…

Her dream team—her artistic cluster—does not necessarily participate in their formal artistic roles (or “positions”) but rather as the experienced practitioners they are, bringing their perspectives. She knows they ask uncomfortable questions and contribute constructive ideas for artistically humane reasons, not speculative ones.