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Gabriella Maione, born in Rome, is an Italian-French theatre and film director, playwright and actress. Her work and conceptual achievements are described as a premonitory "time-collapsed universe where Greek tragedy and today’s world are fused in perpetual simultaneity" (Jonathan Kalb, theater critic for The New York Times).

Biography
Stout-hearted, ironically fierce and enigmatic, Maione’s theatre constantly experiments, in her multi-language wording, layers of epical memory, echoing today’s catastrophe and off-beat ancestral myths as well as, in her directorial creations, she is inclined to challenge the paradigms of time, music and staging. Her questioning the socio-political influence of today’s conventions and power is the essence of what she calls "passion for risk, rebellion and glimmering from the past". Her direction of her own play Symptômes, shown at Opera Bastille, was described as "highly poetic, compelling and poignant like a Pasolinian oratorio" by theater critic, Sorbonne scholar Georges Banu.

As a stage director, which is Maione's main focus today, her most significant directorial debut was Quartett by Heiner Mueller, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, N Y, which received multiple critical acclaim, from The New York Times: "Ms Maione's meticulously choreographed action, deeply sensuous, coupled with emphatic sense of humor… Maione's impressively acted and staged production of Quartett" (Anita Gates).

With Robert Wilson, U.S. foremost avant-garde theater artist, Maione has contributed, as a collaborator, to various workshops of his Watermill Center for the Arts & Humanities, and as a dramaturg of her play Symptômes at Warsaw’s National Theatre, under the stage direction of Robert Wilson.

Maione, as a language virtuoso, never ceased to write, creating dozens of plays, novellas and lyrics in Italian, French, English and Spanish. At the age of 13, she published her first novella Le Scarpe Strette in the daily newspaper Il Popolo di Roma. Her seminal work Symptômes, inspired by the 9/11 attacks, has been published in English by British publishing house Methuen Drama, and in Polish by Panga Pank, Cracow.

Maione developed early on a love for literature, the humanities, theatre and cinema. In Rome, she has collaborated with Pier-Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Angelo Maria Ripellino, etc. In Paris, she studied with the leading Bertold Brecht specialist, scholar Bernard Dort, with Jacques Lassalle (director of the Comédie-Française), Anne Ubersfeld and Georges Banu (critics and preeminent Sorbonne scholars).

After earning degrees in History-Philosophy and in Theatre from both the University of Rome and the Institut de Recherche en Etudes Théatrales, Sorbonne, Paris, she pursued an early career in journalism as broadcaster and editorial writer at RAI (Italian national TV) and in the press. She then made a forray into the acting world performing in one leading role of Pier-Paolo Pasolini The Decameron, which won, among others, the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival. She also was the "Guerillera" in Luis Buñuel’s Oscar-winning film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and acted in Gérard Oury’s top grossing, iconic The Adventures of Rabbi Jacob, among dozens of other roles, in both feature films and television movies.

"What is an encounter with a text ? At first fulguration, foreseeing, a backwards glance into the future, forward into the past : a search through the mother tongue disguised as a foreign language…lyric, epic, tragic, comic…", Gabriella Maione assesses.

Selective Biography

 * 2000 : Pièces détachées, play in French
 * 2005 : Symptômes, play in French, translated and published, Methuen Drama – Bloomesbury (London, 2007), Panga Pank (Cracow, Poland, 2007)
 * 2006 : Les moustiques Romains, play in French
 * 2008 : Quintuple, play in French
 * 2011 : ELECTRE-Choc, play in French
 * 2014 : Roma Amore, play in Italian and Roman dialect
 * 2013–2015 : Jimmy Dand The Ticket, musicals, libretto and book in English (Under development)

Selective Staging

 * 2001 : Quartett, play by Heiner Müller – Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), New York
 * 2004 : Big Shoot, play by Koffi Kwahulé – The Culture Project Theater, New York
 * 2005 : Symptômes, play by Gabriella Maione – Amphithéâtre of the Opéra Bastille, Paris
 * 2011 : Hommage à Michael Galasso, texts by Gabriella Maione - Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), Paris
 * 2013 : Symptoms, play by Gabriella Maione – International Theater Festival of Chicago : Victory Gardens Theater
 * 2015 : Fragments de silence, play by Kebir Ammi – Théâtre 121, Casablanca
 * 2015 : Bettencourt Boulevard, play by Michel Vinaver, staged readings, "Seuls en Scène" Theatre Festival, Princeton University, and "It's Alive!" performance series, M.I.T.
 * 2016 : Premiere planned late 2016 : Symptômes, play by Gabriella Maione, translated in Russian – School of Dramatic Arts (Anatoly Vasiliev), Moscow