Sébastien Kheroufi

Sébastien Kheroufi grew up between the working-class neighborhoods of Hauts-de-Seine and the Emmaüs shelters in Paris. After completing a BEP in mechanics and working a variety of jobs (mechanic, maintenance worker, dishwasher, RATP driver, shop assistant, warehouse worker…), he enrolled at the École Supérieure d’Art Dramatique de Paris (ESAD). Upon graduation, he performed in Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen, directed by Anne-Laure Liégeois (Théâtre du Peuple de Bussang), Transfuges by Alexandra Badea (Théâtre national de la Colline, ESAD), Mais cette nuit, vivre ! after Platonov by Chekhov, directed by Louisa Chas (Théâtre de la Cité internationale), and Viril(e.s) by Marie Mahé.

Winner of the Ateliers Médicis in 2022, he participated in Création en cours and the TRANSAT festival, assisted Anne-Laure Liégeois for the inauguration of the Richelieu site of the BnF, and led a project with UPE2A middle school students in Épinay-sur-Seine on the theme of exile.

In June 2023, he directed his first production, Antigone, at the Théâtre du Soleil. He became an associate artist at the CDN – Théâtre des Quartiers d’Ivry (September 2023) and at the Théâtre de Corbeil-Essonnes | Grand Paris Sud (January 2024). After creating Par les villages in March 2024, he began writing the final chapter of his trilogy during a residency at Villa Medici, which continued during a trip to Algeria in the fall of 2024. Par les villages was restaged as part of the Festival d’Automne in December 2024.

“Bury me where I have lived”

Written during his 2024 residency at Villa Medici, this quote opens Sébastien Kheroufi’s next creation, La mort du môme (working title). Kheroufi’s residency project is driven by the desire to write the first and last sentences at Villa Medici, thereby closing the play. Villa Medici, a space politically so distant from his father’s trajectory—an Algerian immigrant whose life ended on the streets—paradoxically becomes the place where this trajectory finds an echo through its distance. Being at Villa Medici gives him the proper distance and perspective needed to write about the intimate.

His work seeks to restore to this experience its poetic force, far from strictly sociological or statistical readings, with the urgency to speak—the urgency for these bodies and voices to regain the resonance of their humanity and their radical poetry.

La mort du môme takes as its starting point the night when, at seventeen, Sébastien Kheroufi discovered his father dead in his room at a Parisian Emmaüs shelter. Throughout the night, the question of where to bury him arises: France or Algeria? The words “Bury me where I have lived” are discovered by the Child at the same time as his father’s body. They summon the living around a responsibility without material inheritance: not a house or a life insurance policy, but the destination of a final rest.

In a single night, the play unfolds the intimate investigation of a family facing the silence of a man who remained closed off his entire life. It questions the traces of the landscape in the flesh, the dilemma between the land of birth and the land of welcome, and what this question tears apart: family, society, and the Child’s body.

This tragedy is presented at the Théâtre national de la Colline as part of the Festival d’Automne 2026, in partnership with the Centre Pompidou and the Panthéon, which host the prologue.