Biography
Photo: Tomaso Le Pera
Born in Florence, where she studied mural painting at the arts institute. She debuted as a designer when co-operating on Gillo Pontecorvo’s film Giovanna. Today, she primarily works as a costume designer and also teaches at the Istituto d’Arte di Firenze, Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze and the Accademia Silvio D’Amico di Roma. As a designer, she has worked on more than two hundred film, opera, ballet, drama and television productions. In 1969 the stage director Luca Ronconi invited her to participate in the adaptation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso at the Spoleto Festival. The production was subsequently performed within a tour at numerous theatres worldwide. She began working in opera in 1972, when she participated in the staging of Verdi’s I masnadieri at Opera di Roma. In 1975 she launched long-term collaboration with Franco Enriquez, stage director at Teatro di Roma. She worked with Ingmar Bergman on Aeschylus’s Oresteia at the Residenz Theater in Monaco. With the director Armand Delcampe she staged Chekhov’s The Seagull and Schnitzler Casanova’s Homecoming (in both cases, the sets were designed by Josef Svoboda). With Giorgio Albertazzi she worked on numerous theatre and TV productions, one of the most recent being Strauss’s Salome at Opera di Roma (2007). With the director Erik Vos she collaborated on stagings of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo and Verdi’s Falstaff, as well as Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. For the Syracuse Festival (2001 and 2003) she created costumes for Aeschylus’s Oresteia and The Persians (directed by A. Calenda). Other productions she has worked on include Sophocles’ Oedipus for Teatro Greco in Taormina (2002), Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at the Colosseum in Rome (2003) and Mozart’s Don Giovanni (directed by Y. Oida, 2009) in Paris. Moreover, she has regularly collaborated with the ballet ensemble of Opera di Roma. The most noteworthy films she worked on include Profondo rosso, Yuppi du and Un viaggio chiamato amore, for which she was nominated for the David di Donatello Award (“the Italian Oscar”). Together with her husband Italo Dall'Orto, brother Armando and son Giovanni, she founded a theatre company which has created productions based on Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince and Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio.
Update: April 2010