Piersandra Di Matteo

Piersandra Di Matteo is a scholar, dramaturge and curator working in the field of the performing arts. She is the artistic director of the Short Theatre Festival in Rome (2021–24). As a researcher she has worked on the project ‘INCOMMON’, funded by the European Research Council, at the IUAV University in Venice, where she also lectures on curating the performing arts. Her interests in the field of theory range from experimental theatre to the post-dramatic theatre and from the politics of the voice to the practice of curatorship. Thanks to her research findings she has been invited to attend conferences and hold seminars at leading research centres and universities that include the School of Creative Media in Hong Kong, the Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore, the Shanghai Theatre Academy, the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam, the Italian Academy at New York’s Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the São Paulo International Theatre Festival (MITsp). In the autumn of 2017 she was a visiting scholar at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center (MESTC) at New York’s City University.

Piersandra Di Matteo has for many years been Romeo Castellucci’s closest theoretical collaborator and has worked with him at leading theatres and opera houses as well as at major festivals. More recently she has also worked as a dramaturge for the Argentine director Lola Arias and the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera.

Among the numerous projects that she has curated are the multi-format project E la volpe disse al corvo in Bologna, for which she received a Premio UBU in 2014. She was also the artistic curator of the Atlas of Transitions Biennale in Bologna (2017–20), a ‘Creative Europe’ project for Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione.