The Italian director and author Paola Galassi is the special guest of the second FASHION DIALOGUE dedicated to costume at the Italian Cultural Institute in London. In conversation with Matteo Augello, Paola Galassi will tell stories from her career and discuss the importance of costume in theatre and television.
After debuting with Giorgio Strehler in The Tempest and in Harlequin, servant of two masters, Paola Galassi worked as assistant director in operas directed by Maurizio Scaparro, Filippo Crivelli, and Ferruccio Soleri. At the end of the 1980s, she met the comedians Aldo Giovanni e Giacomo with whom she would work for many years. She collaborated with and directed many Italian comedians, such as Claudio Bisio, Sabina Guzzanti, Geppi Cucciari and Frank Matano. Among her TV work, she was the project leader together with Giancarlo Bozzo of the series Buona la Prima with Ale and Franz, Alessandro Betti and Katia Follesa (broadcast on Italia 1).
Galassi is passionate about training young talent. She was a coach of “stage presence” for singers during the programme Xfactor Italia and tutored the comedians Trejolie who won Italia’s Got Talent in 2017. She directed the Scuola del Teatro stabile delle Marche for three years and has been teaching ‘Costume for the Performing Arts’ at NABA in Milan since 2013. In 2023, she founded PAC, the Performing Arts Center in Pesaro with Gampiero Solari, an artistic centre dedicated to theatrical expression for all ages.
The event will take place on Wednesday 5th June at 6.30pm and will last approximately one hour, followed by Q&A. It will be conducted in Italian with English simultaneous translation.
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Matteo Augello is a fashion historian and lecturer based in London. From 2013 to 2017, he was a curatorial consultant to the V&A Museum in London for the exhibition Opera: Passion, Power, Politics. He regularly holds masterclasses on costume at the NABA Academy in Milan and has collaborated with Royal Opera House in London, Teatro Donizetti in Bergamo and American Ballet Theatre in New York. His first book, Curating Italian Fashion: Heritage, Industry, Institutions, was published by Bloomsbury in 2022.