Stefano Mazzotta, born in 1980.

​

A choreographer, director, photographer, and dancer, he first trained at the Scuola dei Cantieri Teatrali Koreja and later graduated from the Civica Scuola d’Arte Drammatica Paolo Grassi in 2000. His artistic vision has developed through a continuous contamination of genres and languages. During his years of training, he studied with masters including Jan Cebron, Beatrice Libonati, Bruce Michelson, Marco Baliani, Raffaella Giordano, Michele Abbondanza, Maria Consagra, and Luciana Melis. He performed for Ismael Ivo in Brazil and Germany, and in Italy during Ivo’s artistic direction of the Venice Biennale. He has also worked in France with Hervé Koubi, and in Italy with Luca Veggetti, Avi Kaiser, Monica Casadei, Roberto Zibetti, Pier Luigi Pizzi, and Susanna Beltrami.

In 2001, he founded Zerogrammi, of which he is artistic director. With the company he has created projects and productions in collaboration with prestigious international theatres and festivals in Italy, Portugal (O Espaço do Tempo, Teatro Municipal Maria Matos, Devir Capa, Materiais Diversos), France (TNG Lyon), Russia (Tsekh, Gogol Theater, Stantsia Art Venue), Singapore (Esplanade Theatre), the Netherlands (Oerol Festival), Germany (Theater Osnabrück), Spain, Taiwan (National Theater & Concert Hall), Finland, Iceland, and Switzerland (Théâtre du Galpon), receiving awards and recognitions including the prestigious Golden Mask awarded by the Bolshoi Theatre, the Hystrio Prize, and the Danza&Danza Prize.

Alongside the path leading to choreographic creation, over the years he has conceived and directed numerous projects capable of applying artistic languages within educational, social, healthcare, and community contexts, involving institutions and organizations operating across disciplines beyond the arts, while simultaneously carrying out extensive activity as a teacher and mentor. Among his major collaborations are the University of Turin, the University of Salento, the Civica Scuola d’Arte Drammatica Paolo Grassi, the Academies of Fine Arts of Turin and Genoa, the University of Bologna, and the Italian choreographic and residency centres Interconnessioni, C.R.E.A., and Lavanderia a Vapore. In the social and community field, he has directed projects in collaboration with organizations including the Icelandic Red Cross and Pesaro 2024 Italian Capital of Culture. Throughout his career, he has also worked as choreographer and dancer within the fashion sector, collaborating with brands and institutions such as Bulgari, Istituto Marangoni, and IED Rome.

Since 2012, he has directed CASA LUFT, Zerogrammi’s headquarters and a cultural hub in Piedmont, where he coordinates a wide-ranging program spanning production, artistic residencies, and professional training (with more than 100 projects and authors supported and produced since 2012), in collaboration with a network of over 50 national and international organizations. Attention to the territory and to the complexities generated by the coexistence of cultural differences forms part, in his cultural vision even before his artistic one, of a vocation for relationship-building that uses artistic language as a tool for cohesion and growth through dialogue. Over time, his creative methodology has strengthened the ability to connect choreographic creation with a complex system of Italian and international residencies and co-productions, as well as training activities and exchanges among artists from different backgrounds and disciplines. His artistic journey, enriched by the inspirations arising from the experience of diverse languages and contexts, becomes not only functional to the creation of live performance works, but also the driving force behind numerous parallel outputs capable of reaching an expanded audience. Alongside his choreographic creations, he has developed editorial projects, photographic catalogues, and film works, including the recent Elegìa delle cose perdute, awarded Best Film at major international festivals including RIFF (Norway), PDFF (USA), Experimental Dance Festival (Canada), International Meeting on Video Dance (Spain), and the International Migration & Environmental Film Festival (Canada).

The dialogue and contaminations generated by this rich body of work — blending choreography with literature, photography, video, and visual arts — become stages of a travel diary rooted in the most authentic form of sharing and in a scenic honesty built upon the words urgency and necessity.

The creative process becomes a dialectical relationship between languages, cultures, and different experiences, where the willingness to lose part of one’s own identity — to be affected, reshaped, and bent by the experience of the other — represents the first essential step toward the attention required by constructive dialogue between differences, and toward the possibility of embarking on a journey of discovery that resides within the dynamic and productive uncertainty of questioning.