Emma Dante

Friday 12 June, 12:00 noon
Ca’ Giustinian, Venice

La Biennale di Venezia presented the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement to the director of theatre and opera, Emma Dante.

“Emma Dante is an artist, a woman who, starting from Palermo, from the heart of her Palermo –as the motivation for the award states– has brought Sicily to the forefront, reinvigorating the great legacy of Luigi Pirandello, Leonardo Sciascia and Andrea Camilleri, as well as Ciprì & Maresco and Franco Scaldati, boldly pursuing not only a unique experimentation with language, but also bringing the power of theatre to the vexatious and painful themes that have always seemed to denote her homeland. In this experimentation, Emma Dante has carried with her, in an eternal and sorrowful confrontation, the themes of family, death and lamentation, dreams and imagination, love and violence: elements in which she has steeped her creativity and her idea of theatre, achieving a distinctly personal and recognizable language. With irony, empathy and affection, Emma Dante has evoked on stage a theatre built on extraordinary simplicity and humanity, which turns its gaze on the meek, the forgotten, the outcasts, on the human and urban marginalities that she has portrayed like few other artists”.

At the 54^th International Theatre Festival Emma Dante is to present the world premiere of I fantasmi di Basile (13 and 14 June, Teatro Piccolo Arsenale). Following the trilogy that brought to the stage La scortecata, Pupo di zucchero and Re Chicchinella, Emma Dante returns to the highly imaginative and baroque world of the Neapolitan author Giambattista Basile.

A graduate in 1990 of the Accademia Nazionale d’Arte Drammatica Silvio D’Amico in Rome, Emma Dante (Palermo, 1967) founded in 1999 the Sud Costa Occidentale company in Palermo, with which she won the Scenario 2001 prize for the mPalermu project and the Ubu 2002 award for best new Italian play. In 2003 she won the Ubu award for best new Italian play again for Carnezzeria, and in 2004 the “Gassman” award for best Italian director and the critics’ award for playwriting and directing. From the theatre to a book: Carnezzeria. Trilogia della famiglia siciliana (Fazi, 2007) with a preface by Andrea Camilleri. In 2004 she came to Biennale Teatro in Venice with La scimia, adapted from the novella Le due zittelle by Tommaso Landolfi. Her first novel, Via Castellana Bandiera (Rizzoli 2008), won the Vittorini and Super Vittorini 2009 award. The novel would later become a film, which premiered in competition at the 70^th Venice International Film Festival of La Biennale di Venezia (2013), and won Elena Cotta the Coppa Volpi for Best Performance by an Actress.
From 2000 to 2011 in Italy and abroad, she presented: mPalermu, Carnezzeria, Vita mia, Mishelle di Sant’Oliva, Medea, Il festino, Cani di bancata, Le pulle, La trilogia degli occhiali.
In 2009 she won the Sinopoli award for culture. That same year she inaugurated the season at La Scala as the director of Bizet’s Carmen, conducted by Daniel Barenboim. She followed with the direction of many operas: La muta di Portici by Auber at the Opéra Comique in Paris (2012), and later produced at the Teatro Petruzzelli in Bari (2013), winning the Abbiati award (2014); Feuersnot by Strauss (Teatro Massimo, 2014); Gisela! by Henze (Teatro Massimo, 2015); La Cenerentola by Rossini (Teatro dell’Opera in Rome, 2016); Macbeth by Verdi (Teatro Massimo, 2017); La voix humaine by Poulenc and Cavalleria Rusticana by Mascagni (Teatro Comunale di Bologna, 2017); The Fiery Angel by Prokofiev (Teatro dell’Opera in Rome, 2019); La Bohème (Teatro San Carlo, 2021); I vespri siciliani by Verdi (Teatro Massimo, 2022); Les dialogues des Carmélites by Poulenc (Teatro dell’Opera in Rome, 2022); Rusalka by Dvořák (Teatro alla Scala, 2023).
Le Sorelle Macaluso, a play staged in 2014, won the Le Maschere award for best play, the Critics’ Award and two Ubu Prizes for best direction and best play. In 2020 it would become a film that premiered at the 77^th Venice International Film Festival of La Biennale di Venezia, winning the Pasinetti Prize for Best Film and the Coppa Volpi for Best Actress for the entire cast.
In 2014 she was appointed artistic director for the 67^th cycle of classical theatre at the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza. She was principal director of the Teatro Biondo and the “School of Performing Arts” established within the resident theatre of the city of Palermo. In 2014 she also won the De Sica Prize for theatre and the Ipazia Prize for excellence by women.
In 2017 she premiered Bestie di scena at the Teatro Strehler in Milan and La scortecata at the Festival of the Two Worlds in Spoleto. At the Teatro Greco in Siracusa, she presented Euripides’ Heracles (2018) and at the La Colline Théâtre National in Paris Fable pour un adieu, freely inspired by Andersen’s The Little Mermaid (2019). In 2020 Misericordia premiered at the Piccolo Teatro Grassi in Milan, and was later adapted into the eponymous film which premiered at the 18^th Rome Film Fest in 2023. In 2025, L’angelo del focolare premiered at the Piccolo Teatro Grassi in Milan. She has recently directed Molière’s Les femmes savantes at the Comédie Française in Paris.