Author, director, and theatre theorist Davide Carnevali – born in Milan in 1981 – earned a PhD in Theatre Theory at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, with a period of study at the Freie Universität Berlin. Among his most well-known works are: Variazioni sul modello di Kraepelin (2009) – awarded at the Theatertreffen Stückemarkt in Berlin, the Riccione per il Teatro Award, and the Prix des Journées de Lyon des Auteurs de Théâtre – Sweet Home Europa (2012), Ritratto di donna araba che guarda il mare (Riccione per il Teatro Award in 2013), Actes obscens en espai públic (2017), and Menelao (2018). He has written and directed, among others, Maleducazione transiberiana (2018), Ein Porträt des Künstlers als Toter (2018), Lorca sogna Shakespeare in una notte di mezza estate (2019). Winner of the Hystrio Prize for Playwriting in 2018, he served as Maestro of the École des Maîtres in 2020/21 and, since 2021, has led the “Authors under 40” workshop at the Venice Biennale. His plays, translated into fifteen languages, have been presented in international seasons and festivals. In Italy, his work is published by Einaudi, il Saggiatore, Sossella, and Fandango Libri; in France, by Actes Sud and Les Solitaires Intempestifs. In the 2022/23 season, he created Ritratto dell’artista da morto, with a Catalan-language staging at the Teatre Lliure in Barcelona and a French-language version currently on tour, co-produced by Le Quai CDN Angers Pays de la Loire, Comédie de Caen – CDN de Normandie, Comédie – CDN de Reims, and Théâtre de Liège. In the 2023/24 season, as part of the Presente Indicativo Festival | Milano Porta Europa, within the European project UNLOCK THE CITY!, he created the site-specific performance Limited Edition in the neighborhoods of Corvetto and Porto di Mare. He has also written and staged several plays for children and youth within the school project Il teatro tiene banco: La favolosa battaglia dei topi e delle rane, Orlando hater e Angelica furiosa and Antigone in cattedra in the 2022/23 season; La meravigliosa avventura di Ciàula nella caverna, Guida pratica per orientarsi nella selva oscura and Sei personaggi in cerca di followers during the 2023/24 season; Viaggio fantastico nel sottosuolo, Quel ladro del Lago di Como and Le smanie per la diplomatura in the 2024/25 season. In the 2025/26 season, he will stage a rewriting of his Variazioni sul modello di Kraepelin.

Marta Cuscunà is a writer and performer of visual theatre, whose work blends activism with puppet-based dramaturgy. In 2009, she won the Scenario per Ustica Award with È bello vivere liberi!, the first chapter of Resistenze femminili, a trilogy that also includes La semplicità ingannata and Sorry, boys. In Il canto della caduta, she combines the ancestral imagery of the Fanes myth with animatronic principles used to manipulate puppets. Earthbound ovvero le storie delle Camille is inspired by Staying with the Trouble, the eco-feminist essay by Donna Haraway. In 2021, she took part in the RAI 3 television programme La Fabbrica del mondo, by Marco Paolini and Telmo Pievani, for which she wrote and performed a mini-series for mechanical crows, focused on eco-feminist themes. In 2023, that series moved from the screen to the stage as a show co-produced by MUSE - Museo delle Scienze di Trento, titled Corvidae. Sguardi di specie. In 2024, she created Bucolica. Paesaggio con fischiatori, pecore e umani, a site-specific performance produced by Piccolo in collaboration with the Politecnico di Milano for the European project UNLOCK THE CITY!. In 2025, she published her latest book Sguardi di specie. Una trilogia ecofemminista. From 2009 to 2019, she was part of Fies Factory, a project by Centrale Fies. As part of the season 2024/25, she performs in Sorry, boys.

Born in 1987, Marco D’Agostin is an artist active in the field of dance and performance. He won the 2018 Ubu Award for Best Performer Under 35 and the 2023 Ubu Award for Best Dance Performance (Gli anni). In 2023 he was awarded the 4th Riccione Special Award for dramaturgical innovation, in 2024 the Hystro Award Corpo a Corpo. His works question the functioning of memory and give life to choreographic devices that, starting from personal or collective archives, try to trigger practices of participation and identification with the audience. His dance, a complex geography in which sounds, words and movements continually collide, always tends toward the emotional compromise of the performer and the spectator. He has worked, among others, with Claudia Castellucci, Alessandro Sciarroni, Liz Santoro, Boris Charmatz. Since 2010, he has presented his works at major European festivals and theatres (including Théâtre de la Ville, Parigi; The Place Theatre, Londra; Kampnagel, Amburgo; Santarcangelo; Romaeuropa; VIE; Torinodanza) and internationally (including ESC Pompeia, San Paolo; Festival de Danza Contemporanea, Buenos Aires; GAM, Santiago de Chile). Among his most renowned works are Everything is OK (2015, winner of the second prize at the French choreographic competition (Re)connaissance), First Love, Avalanche (2018), Best Regards (2021, presented at Piccolo Teatro during the Festival Presente Indicativo: per Giorgio Strehler), SAGA (created with the support of the Hermès Foundation), and Gli anni (2022, with Marta Ciappina). In addition to these titles, in the 2023/24 season, in collaboration with Chiara Bersani, he created Jérôme Bel, a reinterpretation of the “dance-biographical” piece by the French artist of the same name, and again with Chiara Bersani, Hanging Rock, part of Paesaggi condivisi, a series of seven micro-dramaturgies within the framework of the European project Performing Landscapes. In 2024, as part of the series co-published by Piccolo and Il Saggiatore, Anni, lettere e valanghe was released – a volume on the dramaturgies he has created for dance, written with Alessandro Iachino. Marco D’Agostin was one of the protagonists of the season I fili dell’orizzonte, with Gli anni and Asteroide. In the 2025/26 season, he returns to Teatro Studio Melato with First Love.

Daria Deflorian is an actress, writer, and director. As an actress, she has worked with, among others, Nanni Moretti, Stephane Braunschweig, Massimiliano Civica, Lotte Van Den Berg, Lucia Calamaro, Fabrizio Arcuri, Mario Martone, Martha Clarke, Remondi e Caporossi, Fabrizio Crisafulli, Marcello Sambati. She won the Ubu Award for Best Actress in 2012, and in 2013 she was awarded the Hystrio Prize. From 2008 to 2021, she collaborated with Antonio Tagliarini. Their productions, which toured across Italy and Europe, received several awards: the Ubu Award for Best Play in 2014, Best Foreign Show in Canada in 2015, the Riccione Award for playwriting in 2019, and the Hystrio Prize for playwriting in 2021. In 2020, Deflorian and Tagliarini staged Édouard Louis’ text Chi ha ucciso mio padre (Bompiani, 2019), which in 2021 earned Francesco Alberici the Ubu Prize for Best Actor Under 35. Their plays have been published by Titivillus, Cue Press e Sossella editore. In 2020, she collaborated with visual artist Adrian Paci, writing the text for his video work Vedo rosso. With the Oceano Indiano group of Teatro di Roma, she co-founded Radio India during the pandemic, which won the 2021 Ubu Award as Special project. In 2022, she wrote and directed the final-year production for the students of the international theatre school La Manufacture: En finir, from “Changer Method” by Edouard Louis. In 2023, she created Elogio della vita a rovescio, the first stage of a two-year project that culminated in 2024 with the premiere of La vegetariana, scenes from the novel by Han Kang, Nobel Prize for Literature 2024. Since 2021, she has been the artistic co-director of INDEX, alongside the theatre company Muta Imago. She was an associate artist at Triennale Milano from 2022 to 2024. In our 2025/26 season, she will be featured in a retrospective including the works Memoria di ragazza, La vegetariana, Chi ha ucciso mio padre, and Elogio della vita a rovescio.

After studying dance at the Mudra School in Brussels and at the Tisch School of the Arts in New York, in 1980 Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (born in 1960) created Asch, her first choreographic work. Two years later came the premiere of Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich. In 1983, De Keersmaeker founded the dance company Rosas in Brussels while creating the piece Rosas danst Rosas. Beginning with these groundbreaking works, her choreography has been rooted in a rigorous and prolific exploration of the relationship between dance and music. With Rosas, she has developed a vast repertoire in dialogue with musical structures and scores from various eras, from early music to contemporary and popular music. Her choreographic practice also draws on formal principles from geometry, numerical patterns, the natural world, and social structures, offering a unique perspective on the articulation of the body in space and time. In 1995, De Keersmaeker founded the school P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) in Brussels. Over the past ten years, her work has also engaged with the visual arts, presented in museum contexts such as the Louvre, Tate Modern, and MoMA. In 2023, she created EXIT ABOVE with a cast of 13 dancers, and in 2024 IL CIMENTO, an exploration of Antonio Vivaldi’s Le quattro stagioni. Her most recent creation, BREL (2025), is a collaboration with dancer and choreographer Solal Mariotte.

Playwright, actor, director, and novelist, Davide Enia was born in Palermo in 1974. In 2002, he wrote, directed, and performed Italia-Brasile 3 a 2, which won the 2003 Special Ubu Award, followed by Scanna, which won the Riccione/Tondelli Award in 2003. In 2004, he created maggio ’43, once again as both author and performer, earning the Hystrio Prize and the E.T.I. Prize in 2005 as Best Author of New Dramatic Work for his overall body of work, and in 2019, the Le Maschere del Teatro Italiano Prize as Best Performer in a Monologue. In 2006, he was awarded the Vittorio Mezzogiorno and Gassmann Prizes as Best Emerging Talent. In 2012, he published his first novel, Così in terra (Baldini & Castoldi Dalai), which was translated and published worldwide; the French edition, Sur cette terre comme au ciel (Albin Michel), won the Prix du premier roman étranger and the Prix Brignoles for Best Foreign Novel of the Year in 2016. Così in terra was republished in 2023 by Sellerio. In 2017, he directed L’oca del Cairo, an unfinished opera by Mozart, at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo. That same year, he published his second novel, Appunti per un naufragio (Sellerio, 2017), also released in France, USA, Germany, Spain, Greece, and Portugal. The novel won the International Mondello Literary Prize, the Super Mondello, and the Mondello Giovani in 2018. From this novel came the stage play L’abisso (2018), which received the Hystrio Twister Prize for Best Show of the Year, the Le Maschere del Teatro Prize for Best Performer in a Monologue, and won the Ubu Award for Best New Italian Play or Dramatic Writing. He featured in our 2022/23 season with the production Eleusi, a 24-hour collective theatrical ritual involving more than 30 choirs and 21 performers, and with Italia-Brasile 3 a 2. Il ritorno, a restaging of his earlier play created to mark the 40th anniversary of the historic football match. In the 2024/25 season, he returns to the stage with the co-production Autoritratto, which premiered at the Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi in June 2024. The text is published by Sellerio (Palermo, 2025).

Four artists make up the FC Bergman theatre collective: Stef Aerts, Joé Agemans, Thomas Verstraeten and Marie Vinck. With their sensational site-specific productions, they made a splash the moment the company was founded back in 2008. In 2013 FC Bergman came under the wing of Toneelhuis. In May 2022 FC Bergman assumed the artistic direction of Toneelhuis, together with Olympique Dramatique, Lisaboa Houbrechts, Gorges Ocloo and Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe. The thread running through FC Bergman’s work is the tragedy of the little guy struggling to branch out and broaden his horizons. This is often reflected in enormous stage sets and installations to which the actors endeavour to measure up. The scenography is the “beast that has to be tamed”, the show a composition of images. FC Bergman has played the past 17 years in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Austria Switzerland, Greece, Spain, Italy, England, Poland, USA, Luxembourg, Norway, Scotland, Russia, Taiwan and Australia. The company was a guest at the 2016 Avignon festival with The Land of Nod. In 2021, FC Bergman was there for the second time, this time with the performance The Sheep Song. In 2022, the company made it to The New York Times' prestigious “Best Of” list with 300 el x 50 el x 30 el. In 2023, FC Bergman was a guest at the Venice Biennale with The Land of Nod. There, the company won the prestigious Leone d’Argento for Theatre. It is a crowning achievement for their entire oeuvre: poetic yet at the same time irreverent theatre, which arouses a feeling of disconcerting apprehension in the viewer. FC Bergman was present in our 2024/25 season with the international co-production Works and Days.

Niccolò Fettarappa (Rome, 1996) is a writer, actor, and director. He graduated in Philosophy in Bologna. He made his theatrical debut with Apocalisse Tascabile, which he wrote, directed, and performed. The play won several prestigious awards, including In-box 2021, the Critics' Award at the Nolo Fringe Festival, the United Juries Award at Direction Under 30, the Premio Italia dei Visionari, and earned him a nomination for the Rete Critica Award 2022. With Apocalisse Tascabile, he began a tour that took him all over Italy, receiving enthusiastic acclaim from both audiences and critics. Since 2021, he has held annual workshops on playwriting and staging at Carrozzerie N.o.t. In 2025, he leads the workshop “Caro Nemico, ti scrivo” for the advanced training course at Teatro di Roma. In 2022, he was featured in the FUTUROpresente series on Radio 3, curated by Antonio Audino and Laura Palmieri, with his text Nel mio bagno di sangue. La Sparanoia. Atto unico senza feriti gravi purtroppo is his second theatrical work, which he wrote and performs in, produced by Agidi and Sardegna Teatro. Together with Lorenzo Maragoni, he wrote and performed Solo Quando Lavoro Sono Felice, produced by Corte Ospitale, with which he won a Special Mention at the Forever Young Award 2022. In 2023, he was a finalist for the Riccione Award “Pier Vittorio Tondelli” with Orgasmo. Prosa dispiaciuta sulla fine del sesso, presented as part of REF–Situazione Drammatica 2024. His plays have been published by Ronzani Editore. In 2024, he wrote and directed Uno Spettacolo Italiano with Nicola Borghesi, produced by ERT, Agidi, and Sardegna Teatro. In 2025, as part of the Wordbox series at Teatro Stabile di Bolzano, he presents Il Perdente. Commedia con disprezzo, and, again with Lorenzo Maragoni, he writes Showpero. Manifesto Selvaggio Contro Il Talento, presented at the Salone del Libro in Turin in 2025 and published by TLON. In the 2025/26 season, he is on stage with Orgasmo. Prosa dispiaciuta sulla fine del sesso. 

Born in 1979 in Avezzano, Lino Guanciale was selected for the Accademia Nazionale d’Arte Drammatica “Silvio d’Amico”, where he graduated in 2003, also receiving the Gassman Prize as the Best Student of the Last Ten Years. Immediately after, in theatre, he began working with directors such as Gigi Proietti (Romeo e Giulietta, the inaugural performance of Rome’s Globe Theatre), Franco Branciaroli (La peste, Cos’è l’amore, Lo zio – Der Onkel), Luca Ronconi (Atti di guerra), Walter Le Moli (Gli incostanti, Antigone), Massimo Popolizio (Ploutos o della ricchezza, Ragazzi di vita), Giampiero Solari (After Miss Julie), and Michele Placido, who directed him on stage in Fontamara and later in the film Vallanzasca – Gli angeli del male. Particularly significant is his long-standing collaboration with Claudio Longhi (La folle giornata o Il matrimonio di Figaro, Nella solitudine dei campi di cotone, Sallinger, Prendi un piccolo fatto vero, La resistibile ascesa di Arturo Ui, awarded the ANCT Award for Show of the Year, Il ratto d’Europa, winner of the Special Ubu Award, Istruzioni per non morire in pace, La classe operaia va in paradiso, for which he won both the Ubu and the ANCT Awards as Best Actor, Ho paura torero, Longhi’s first direction at the Piccolo after becoming its director). In recent seasons, he has brought to the stage Non svegliate lo spettatore, a tribute to the life and works of Ennio Flaiano, Dialoghi di profughi by Bertolt Brecht, Zoo by Sergio Blanco, L’uomo più crudele del mondo by Davide Sacco, and made his directorial debut with Nozze by Elias Canetti, followed by Europeana by Patrik Ourednik. Since 2005, he has also worked in education and scientific-theatrical teaching in high schools and universities (he is a member of the teaching staff at IUAV in Venice). He made his film debut in 2008, playing Mozart in Io, Don Giovanni by Carlos Saura, followed by La prima linea by Renato De Maria, Vallanzasca, Il gioiellino by Andrea Molaioli, Il mio domani by Marina Spada, To Rome with Love by Woody Allen, La scoperta dell’alba by Susanna Nicchiarelli, Happy Days Motel by Francesca Staasch, Il volto di un’altra by Pappi Corsicato, L’estate sta finendo by Stefano Tummolini, Maraviglioso Boccaccio by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, I peggiori by Vincenzo Alfieri, La casa di famiglia by Augusto Fornari, and Arrivano i prof by Ivan Silvestrini. On television, he has acted in the series Il segreto dell’acqua and Una grande famiglia, and was the lead in several highly successful RAI productions: Che Dio ci aiuti 2 and 3, La dama velata, Non dirlo al mio capo, La porta rossa, L’allieva, Il commissario Ricciardi, Noi, Il conte di Montecristo, and the Sky series Un’estate fa. In 2015, he won the Flaiano Award as Breakthrough Performer of the Italian Entertainment Scene. In 2024, he was nominated for the Ubu Award as Best Leading Actor for Ho paura torero, which sold out at Teatro Grassi in both the 2023/24 and 2024/25 seasons. For the 2025/26 season, he is featured in our new production Miracolo a Milano.

Caroline Guiela Nguyen, director and filmmaker. Together with her long-term company, Les Hommes Approximatifs, project after project, she has created an aesthetic and a study of new forms that leave a permanent mark. Since 2013, her work has been toured throughout France and the world. Since 2023, she has been the director of the Théâtre national de Strasbourg (TnS), and of the School of Theatrical Arts. The artistic and pedagogical project that she has created maintains that the space should be used to bring together daily and guest activities and be committed to a constant reflection on the relationship between the local population and the works presented. In January 2023, she presented FRATERNITÉ, conte fantastique and during the season 2024/25 I fili dell’orizzonte she presented LACRIMA.

lacasadargilla is an ensemble. Composed of Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli – writer and director –, Alessandro Ferroni – director and sound designer –, Alice Palazzi – actress and project coordinator – and Maddalena Parise – researcher and visual artist –, it works on theatre productions, installations, radio projects, special formats, and curatorial ventures. The group gathers around it a fluid network of actors, musicians, playwrights, and visual artists. lacasadargilla bases its work on original writing, literary rewritings, and contemporary texts. Among its theatre productions: La casa d’argilla, Il libro delle domande, Foto di gruppo in un interno, Jakob von Gunten from Robert Walser, and Lear by Edward Bond. Among its special projects: IF/Invasioni (dal) Futuro, Art You Lost? 1000 persone per un’opera d’arte. Among its melologues for words, music and images: Les Adieux! Parole salvate dalle fiamme and Storia della tua vita. Arrival from Ted Chiang. In 2019, the play When the Rain Stops Falling by Andrew Bovell won three Ubu Awards. In 2021, they staged Heart's Desire by Caryl Churchill. In 2022, Il Ministero della Solitudine premiered at VIE Festival and won the Ubu Award for Best Direction. In February 2023, lacasadargilla premiered at the Piccolo with Anatomia di un suicidio by Alice Birch – a work never staged in Italy – which went on to win five Ubu Awards and was part of the 2024/25 season as well. Also from 2023 is the modular project Città sola by Olivia Laing. In 2024, they premiered the new piece Uccellini by Rosalinda Conti and the site-specific theatre/multimedia project Beautiful Creatures. Storie di lupi, di lantanidi e ginestre. Since 2021, lacasadargilla has been a partner in the European projects STAGES (Sustainable Theatre Alliance for a Green Environmental Shift) and PLAYGROUND / Creative Europe (2024–2026). For our theatre, in March 2022, they also staged A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction by Miranda Rose Hall. lacasadargilla is featured in Complemento di relazione with the new co-production Escaped Alone.

Parini Secondo was founded in 2017 by dancers Sissj Bassani, Martina Piazzi, Camilla Neri and Francesca Pizzagalli. Questioning the relationship between art and originality, the group uses choreography to sublimate pop tendencies, embracing a strong formal rigour. The well-established collaboration with musician, producer and teacher Alberto Ricca/Bienoise denotes their transversal approach to dance, understood as rhythmic movement in close relationship with music. After completing individual training at academies and companies in Italy, Portugal, and Denmark, Parini Secondo settled in Emilia-Romagna, between Bologna and Cesena. Their debut in the Italian performing arts scene took place in 2022 with the iconic SPEEED (2020), which was selected for Vetrina della Giovane Danza d'Autore. The international scene is reached with HIT OUT (2024), BolzanoDanza/TanzBozen and Santarcangelo Festival co-production, selected for CINARS 2024 (Montreal) and touring Japan, America, Taiwan and Europe. In 2025, Parini Secondo joins Associazione Culturale VAN and becomes an associate artist of the Piccolo (2025-2027). Two projects are scheduled to debut in 2026: a new production inspired by trance music, selected for NID Platform 2025, and SLOOOOOOW, an extended reinterpretation of SPEEED, selected for the DanceBase/Yokohama (JP) residency programme, in collaboration with Rino Daidoji. In 2024 Parini creates the festival Tra questa gente esiste un sentimento within the season of Teatro Petrella in Longiano (IT); in 2025 they curate part of the programming of IMBOSCO within the 54th edition of Santarcangelo Festival.

Artistic Director of the Festival d’Avignon since September 2022, Tiago Rodrigues is an actor, director, playwright, producer, and co-founder, together with Magda Bizarro, of the company Mundo Perfeito (2003). Among his most important works, which have received numerous awards in Portugal – where he was Artistic Director of the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II in Lisbon from 2015 to 2021 – and internationally, are By Heart (2013), António e Cléopatra (2014), Bovary (2014), and Sopro (2017). His more recent works include Catarina e a beleza de matar fascistas (2020), La Cerisaie (Festival d’Avignon, 2021), Chœur des Amants (2021), and Dans la mesure de l’impossible (2022), created for the Comédie de Genève in co-production with the Piccolo, and presented during the first edition of the Festival Presente indicativo. The volume Teatro, published in collaboration with Il Saggiatore, collects the Italian versions of Catarina e a beleza de matar fascistas, Chœur des Amants, and Dans la mesure de l’impossible. In May 2024, he was one of the featured artists at Festival Presente indicativo | Milano Porta Europa with Entrelinhas.

Sotterraneo are a theatre collective set up in Florence in 2005. Their pieces are easily recognizable for their avant-pop approach, combining collective imagination with unconventional thinking. Over the years, they have created several shows which were showcased in major national and international theatres – in Spain, Germany, France, Belgium, Greece, UK, Portugal, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Russia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Croatia, Chile, China, South Korea. The shows obtained a number of awards including Lo Straniero, Hystrio, BeFestival First Award (Birmingham UK), Silver Laurel Wreath Award (Sarajevo MESS Festival), as well as three Ubu awards, two of them for Best Italian Theatre Show with Overload and L’Angelo della Storia - both coproduced, among the others, by Teatro Nacional D. Maria II in Lisbon directed by Tiago Rodrigues. Sotterraneo are part of the Centrale Fies and resident at Teatri di Pistoia. During the 2025/26 season they are on stage with L’Angelo della Storia, DJ-SHOW, Talk show and Il fuoco era la cura. 

Łukasz Twarkowski is a creator of multimedia performances combining theatre and visual arts. He places his projects in the context of extending reality through multimedia. A crucial element of Twarkowski's creative work is investigating the ability and limitations of theatre as a medium and tool of communication. By permanent deconstruction of narratives, questioning the fixed habits of the audience and by meaningful usage of new media, Twarkowski creates a new, original language of stage performance based on multimedia and, more widely, digital technologies. In using these, Twarkowski analyses and observes increasingly complex relations between the Real, the Symbolic and the Imagined. His projects are being programmed at the most important festivals and stages around the world, among others: Odéon - Théâtre de l’Europe, Ruhrtriennale, New York Skirball Center, Festival de Otoño de Madrid, Wiener Festwochen, Southbank Center London, Onassis Stegi, Taipei Performing Arts Center, Holland Festival, Münchner Kammerspiele, Théâtre de Vidy, Thalia Theatre. Rohtko, his first theatrical work to be presented in Italy, was staged at the Teatro Strehler in May 2024 during the Festival Presente Indicativo | Milano Porta Europa and won the Ubu Award as Best foreign show presented in Italy.