Valeria Orani

curator/ creative producer

For over thirty years, Valeria Orani has produced live theatre in both non-profit and commercial settings, a vocation which led in 2003 to the creation of 369gradi, the first Italian organization devoted to supporting, promoting, and managing young companies producing innovative theatre. Over time 369gradi has expanded its activities to embrace performance art and contemporary culture more broadly.

Orani applies her organizational methodology, developed from deep experience with the dynamics of live performance, its audiences, and an international perspective, to the formation and mentorship of independent theatre ensembles, assisting them in developing projects, building audiences, and establishing connections with producing and granting organizations.

Having worked for a decade, specifically on production support, in 2013, 369gradi shifted its focus to concentrate on innovative theatre in Italy and began to specialize in creating an American market for new Italian theatre.

While living in New York, Orani could not fail to notice the absence of any public structure or system dedicated to developing new art. This gap motivated her to discover ways to establish a dialogue between creators and potential public and private funding sources for artistic production.

In collaboration with the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center – Graduate Center of the City University, New York, Orani initiated in 2015 the Italian and American Playwrights Project, dedicated to connecting contemporary Italian playwrights to English-speaking audiences through the translation and staging of their work. Today, the project is in its third edition. Under the guidance of an international advisory board, it collaborates with CUNY and the Italian Cultural Institute (an arm of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs), LaMama Theatre, New York University, the Premio Riccione, and Italian Public Radio (Radio3 Rai). The resulting translations won the Premio Nazionale per la Traduzione D.G. Biblioteche in 2019, and Adriana Rossetto’s translation of Armando Pirozzi’s play, A Notebook for Winter, has been produced as a film.

In 2019, her project AMINA/ANIMA (SOUL) won the IdentityLab_2 grant from the Region of Sardinia for the international dissemination of contemporary Sardinian culture. Notwithstanding COVID-19, Orani curated this project from conception to realization. AMINA culminated in 2021 with the Orani-curated Giornata del Contemporaneo (AMACI – Direzione General Cultura Contemporanea), entailing an exhibition of the work of Antonio Marras, with a performance, APORIA, combining drawings by Marras and choreography by Marco Angelilli at the Italian Cultural Institute, New York.

Since 2021, the Sardinian town of Bonorva has entrusted Orani with the creation and production of an annual festival, MusaMadre, which takes place in multiple locations in Rebeccu, an uninhabited medieval village. This multidisciplinary festival combines cinema, theatre, music, and performance art. It features an extended residency by Ischèliu/Richiamo, involving Sardinians and artists with Sardinian roots who conceive and create multidisciplinary diaries evoking their experience as exiles and descendants.

Her ongoing collaboration with artist and fashion designer Antion Marras has produced the Spring-Summer Digital Fashion Show, a project filmed in the forest of Santu Lussurgiu, devastated by fire in 2021. This video production, which debuted at Milan Fashion Week in September 2021, has been praised and discussed in the most important fashion magazines worldwide.

In 2021, Orani received the Alziator Prize for her commitment to producing contemporary culture in Sardinia.