Anastasia Dimitrova
After getting a beer in the ABF café she walks out of the building and chooses the yellow bench in front of it as the interview set up; she lights a cigarette and immediately asks “so, do you have any questions for me?”
Her name is Anastasia Dimitrova, or Nana as some of her friends know her. She’s 19 years old and originally from Sofia but decided to move to Blagoevgrad to study at the American University, which she believes offers the diversity you would get from studying abroad, without being that far from home.
On top of studying full time, she works remotely for a German rent-a-car company, that she describes as being very diverse: “I think it’s a pretty great company, it has a very open-minded attitude towards their employees, and it is also more diverse than what we are accustomed to here in Bulgaria.” This job also gave her the chance to learn the German language, and now she is considering moving to Germany to get her Master’s.
Even though between the university and her job she doesn’t have a lot of time for hobbies, one of her greatest passions is theatre; she started taking classes at the early age of four, when her parents signed her up to help with her social skills, and she stayed in the course for almost 15 years. “I think that theatre does a great job of bringing people together, that’s one of the things I love most about it,” she says. And also describes the feeling of performing as a “trust fall”, sometimes a literal one, since you depend a lot on people to do their work right for you to be able to do yours. But she loves the feeling, “you get excited by the feeling of fear, but you want to do it; you want to be good at it,” she says.
Nana even considered pursuing her studies only in theatre, but she did not want to leave her politics interest behind. As of now, she is looking to major in Political Science with a minor in Fine Arts.
She also has a huge interest in helping people, and theatre gives her the chance to contribute her grain of sand. “If people commit to overlapping charity and art, the results are pretty great,” she believes.
One of the things you notice when your first meet her is her body art. She has multiple tattoos, all well thought of and related to each other. They are very personal, and she considers them as one of her main ways of artistic expression.
“The collaboration between you and a tattoo artist is also very inspirational,” she describes the process of seeing your idea go from your mind to paper and finally to skin as beautiful and exciting.
“[a tattoo] can be a story or a compilation of experiences, songs that you’ve heard or anything that you liked, compiled on your body for the rest of your life, which I find so beautiful,” she said.
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Valeria Calò is a JMC Major at the American University in Bulgaria. She interviewed Anastasia in person on Thursday, November 18th of 2021.
