Paolo Fantin

Paolo Fantin was born in Castelfranco in Italy in 1981 and studied set design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. In 2011 he received the prestigious Premio Abbiati for his designs for Sigismondo at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro as well as for Don Giovanni at La Fenice in Venice and for Madama Butterfly at the Teatro Regio in Turin.
Paolo Fantin has worked closely with Damiano Michieletto since 2004, starting with Britten’s The Little Sweep in Trapani. In 2005 they were finalists in the Ring Award, the International Competition for Stage Direction and Stage Design in Graz, with their project for Le nozze di Figaro. They went on to work together on La gazza ladra (Premio Abbiati, 2008), La scala di seta and Sigismondo at the Rossini Opera Festival, Rota’s Il cappello di paglia di Firenze in Genoa, Das Land des Lächelns in Trieste, Lucia di Lammermoor, Il corsaro, Luisa Miller and Poliuto in Zurich, Michael Daugherty’s Jackie O at the Lugo Opera Festival, Roméo et Juliette and the three Mozart–Da Ponte operas in Venice, Die Entführung aus dem Serail in Naples, Madama Butterfly in Turin, L’elisir d’amore in Valencia, Martinů’s The Greek Passion in Palermo, Così fan tutte at Tokyo’s New National Theatre and Il barbiere di Siviglia in Geneva.

Paolo Fantin made his Salzburg Festival debut in 2012 with Damiano Michieletto’s production of La bohème. They returned for Falstaff (2013) and La Cenerentola (2014). Elsewhere they have worked together on Il trittico, Idomeneo, Rossini’s Otello and Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Theater an der Wien, Un ballo in maschera at La Scala, The Rake’s Progress in Leipzig, Guillaume Tell and Cavalleria rusticana /Pagliacci (Olivier Award, 2016) at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Il viaggio a Reims and Rigoletto in Amsterdam, Die Zauberflöte, Filippo Perocco’s Aquagranda (Premio Abbiati, 2017) and Die lustige Witwe in Venice, Cendrillon at the Komische Oper in Berlin, La donna del lago at the Rossini Opera Festival, Samson et Dalila and Don Pasquale in Paris and La Damnation de Faust in Rome (Premio Abbiati, 2018). In 2018/19 he returned to La Fenice for Macbeth and made his Frankfurt Opera debut with Der ferne Klang.

Revivals have taken him to Milan, Rome, Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Copenhagen, Brussels, Moscow, Venice, Bologna, Florence, Verona, Graz, Liège, Shanghai and Muscat.
Paolo Fantin has also worked with Damiano Michieletto in the spoken theatre and designed the sets for Goldoni’s The Fan and Gogol’s The Government Inspector in Padua and Valle-Inclán’s Divine Words and The Threepenny Opera at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan.