Willem Dafoe is the new artistic director of Biennale Teatro: “I am a stage animal”

The actor comments on the nomination: "I was born in the theater, which formed and shook me"

ROME – Willem Dafoe is the new artistic director of the Theater sector of the Venice Biennale for the two-year period 2025-2026. “I was first surprised and then happy to receive the invitation from Pietrangelo Buttafuoco as director of the International Theater festival of the Venice Biennale 2025-2026”, comments Dafoe. “I am aware that I am known as a film actor but I was born in the theatre, the theater formed me and shook me. I am a stage animal. I am an actor. The theater makes me educated in art and lifeI have worked with the Wooster Group for twenty-seven years, I have collaborated with great directors from Richard Foreman to Bob WilsonThe direction of my theater program will be traced by my personal training A sort of exploration of the essence of the body“.

The appointment was approved by the Board of Directors of the Biennale chaired by Pietrangelo Buttafuoco. “It is an honor to be able to announce the appointment of Willem Dafoe as Director of the Biennale Teatro”, declares Pietrangelo Buttafuoco. “The theater is in fact the original home of his luminous career. Among the founders of the legendary Wooster Group in 1977, in the perfect control of his stage body there has always been discipline, knowledge, passion and profound awareness of the theater. I can’t wait, like everyone else, to be a spectator of the festival that he will build as artistic director and – from his chair as an absolute master – to see the girls and boys of the Theater College grow in art”.