Christiane Jatahy

Born in Rio de Janeiro, Christiane Jatahy is an author, theatre director and filmmaker. She graduated in Theatre and Journalism and holds a postgraduate in Art and Philosophy. Since 2003, she developed a body of work that explores the border zones between artistic disciplines, between reality and fiction, actor and character, theatre and cinema. In 2011 she premiered Julia, based on Strindberg’s Miss Julie. The play was rewarded the Shell Award 2012 for best theatrical direction in Brazil and has been presented at major theatres and festivals in Europe and the US, among them Wiener Festwochen (2013). In 2012 she created, directed and coordinated In the comfort of your home as part of the cultural program of the 2012 Olympics, a series of interventions, documentary work, performances and video installations by 30 Brazilian artists in the privacy of households in London. In 2014, she premiered What if they went to Moscow? based on Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, splitting the audience between a cinema and a theatre. It was recognised with the Shell Award, the Questão de Crítica Award and the APTR Award. Concluding the Memory Trilogy (including Julia and What if they went to Moscow?), she created The Walking Forest in 2015, loosely based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, combining live performance with a video installation and live cinema. The Walking Forest was shown at Wiener Festwochen in 2018. In 2016 Christiane Jatahy directed her opera, staging Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro, mixing the live performance with filmic elements. Deepening her research into the question of refugees, she started to develop the diptych Our Odyssey, inspired by Homer's Odyssey, in 2018. The first part, Ithaca is confronting Homer’s epic and the reality of today’s refugees crossing the Mediterranean. The second part, The Lingering Now, based on Homer’s epic as well as on documentary material filmed in Palestine, Lebanon, South Africa, Greece and the Amazon, is a dialogue between theatre and film, mixing Greek fiction with real stories from refugee artists.
Entre chien et loup, premiered at the Avignon festival 2021 and inspired by the film Dogville, is the first part of a Trilogy of Horror. The second part Before the sky falls connects Shakespeare’s Macbeth with The Falling Sky by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert to approach the violence of toxic masculinity, the political power of patriarchy, and its inherent aggression against the feminine in all its emanations. The trilogy’s final part Depois do silêncio (based on the book Torto Arado by Itamar Vieira jr.) focuses on structural racism and premiered at Wiener Festwochen in 2022. Christiane Jatahy received the Golden Lion for her life’s work at the 50^th Festival Internazionale del Teatro of the Venice Biennale in 2022.