Luigi Noah De Angelis appointed next Artistic Director of Santarcangelo Festival

A director, filmmaker, and musician, and founder of the Ravenna-based company Fanny & Alexander, he will lead the Festival from 2027 to 2029

 
Luigi Noah De Angelis — director, set designer, lighting designer, filmmaker, and electronic composer, and founder of the renowned theatre company Fanny & Alexander — will be the next Artistic Director of Santarcangelo Festival. Appointed through a direct invitation by the Board of Directors of Santarcangelo dei Teatri, chaired by Giovanni Boccia Artieri and composed of Ludovica Parmeggiani and Zoe Baldazzi, Noah De Angelis will lead the Festival from 2027 to 2029, continuing the institution’s dual international and local vocation while renewing its dialogue with the community and the contemporary artistic landscape.

His term will take effect in August 2026, following the five-year artistic directorship of Tomasz Kireńczuk, who will lead the Festival to its 56th edition in July 2026. Kireńczuk congratulates him on the appointment and assures his full support throughout the transition period, which will conclude with the official handover next summer. Afterward, Kireńczuk will take on the leadership of BRUT, the production center and performance house in Vienna.

Born in Brussels in 1974, Luigi Noah De Angelis founded the company Fanny & Alexander in Ravenna together with Chiara Lagani in 1992. His work spans multiple languages and formats, placing at its core the relationship between music, cinema, sound design, photography, and architecture. He has directed and created visual and sound projects for operas, performances, and installations, as well as soundtracks and sound design for numerous theatre productions. Since 2024, alongside his theatre work, he has also been active as a film director, working on his first feature film, produced by Bilico (Brussels).

“Throughout its long history, Santarcangelo has always alternated curatorial figures with artistic personalities at its direction, recognizing in this succession a vital principle of renewal: a way to question and reinvent the languages, processes, and forms through which artistic presence unfolds in public space,” states the Board of Directors of Santarcangelo dei Teatri. “From this perspective, Luigi Noah De Angelis represents a deeply coherent choice. His experience as an artist, director, and founder of Fanny & Alexander, combined with his ability to move fluidly between theatre, music, and the visual arts, brings to the Festival a multidisciplinary sensibility lived as a daily practice of crossing and blending languages. His vision will place at the center the creation of collective experiences and a reflection on the relationship between bodies, sound, and space — elements that can offer the Festival the performative and relational depth that defines its identity. Noah De Angelis is also the right figure to strengthen the Festival’s connection with the local community, not as a backdrop or mere context, but as an active interlocutor and co-protagonist in artistic processes. His intention to relocate permanently to Santarcangelo carries both symbolic and practical significance: it means inhabiting the territory, sharing its everyday life, in line with a tradition established by recent artistic directors and strongly supported by the Board. At the same time, his international profile ensures continuity with the Festival’s cosmopolitan vocation, fostering dialogue between the Italian and European scenes and consolidating the network of international relations that Santarcangelo has built over the years. Luigi Noah De Angelis’ directorship thus stands at the intersection of rootedness and openness, of relational care and a drive toward artistic research. It is an invitation to imagine the Festival as a living ecosystem in which the performing arts not only take place, but welcome, connect, and transform.”

The Municipal Administration of Santarcangelo di Romagna, which chairs the Board of Shareholders, expresses its satisfaction with the choice of the Board of Directors and wishes the new direction every success. Mayor Filippo Sacchetti commented on the appointment: “Every renewal of the Artistic Direction has, for fifty-six years, been an important opportunity of growth in the cultural vision that our Festival continues to generate, bringing with it a new momentum for interpreting the contemporary world. This transition is also a challenging moment for the Municipal Administration: while thanking Tomasz Kireńczuk for his valuable work, which is still ongoing, we welcome Luigi Noah De Angelis, who will accompany us during our mandate. We believe that his experience can be a key factor in shaping work that must necessarily engage with the urban space, paying great attention to the role that Santarcangelo, with its unique spaces reimagined each year in a performative perspective, has always played within the theatrical and cultural system. His proximity to the city can only serve as an even stronger impetus for the Italian and international scene, fostering a vision that is increasingly multidisciplinary and capable of engaging the audience.”
 

A FOREST OF GAZES

“Since I was invited to assume the Artistic Direction of Santarcangelo Festival for the 2027–2029 triennium, a foundational image has begun to pulse within me” — comments Luigi Noah De Angelis. “That of a forest of gazes, a horizontal forest of eyes, of rhizomatic intertwining, of underground alliances — a curatorial ecosystem made of correspondences and rebounds — that knows how to grasp the urgencies of the present by combining the local with the international, without borders or hierarchical pyramids among possible artistic expressions.

Curating, as Frie Leysen said, is the hyphen that connects the public and the artists, a role I feel compelled to share with many other eyes: each year, I will invite a group of Italian and international artists to explore the panorama of world performing arts, starting from Italy, to intercept other visions to relate to their own artistic journey, to present in the Festival one or more forms to let germinate side by side in a mirrored manner, creating a habitat of interconnected, dialoguing, consociated works.

It will be my care and desire to try to imagine in the city and territory of Santarcangelo an architecture, a porous landscape, to let this curatorial biotope grow and welcome the hurting, necessary voice of the invited artists and the forest of gazes of the audience”.
 

LUIGI NOAH DE ANGELIS

Luigi Noah De Angelis was born in Brussels in 1974. He is a director, set designer, lighting designer, video maker, and electronic composer. In 1992, together with Chiara Lagani, he founded the company Fanny & Alexander in Ravenna. The productions he has created have been presented in Italy and abroad at international festivals and showcases, including: Festival d’Automne (Paris, France), Venice Biennale Theatre, Santarcangelo Festival, Volterra Teatro, Drodesera, Napoli Teatro Festival, Ravenna Festival, Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels, Belgium), Bitef (Belgrade, Serbia), Eurokaz and Music Zagreb Biennal (Zagreb, Croatia), Mess Festival (Sarajevo, Bosnia), Mostra Sesc Des Artes (São Paulo, Brazil), Norderzone (Groningen, Netherlands), Kampnagel (Hamburg, Germany), Flying Circus Project (Singapore), Aylul Festival (Beirut, Lebanon), Tampere Festival (Finland), Theatre Hermitage (Moscow, Russia), Perfect Performance (Stockholm, Sweden), FIBA (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Welcome to the Village (Leeuwarden, Netherlands), Operadagen (Rotterdam, Netherlands), Concertgebouw (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Boulez Saal (Berlin, Germany), Hong Kong and Shanghai (China), and Festival Presente Indicativo – Piccolo Teatro di Milano.

Since 2015, he has directed and designed sets, lighting, and video for numerous operas, including Die Zauberflöte by W. A. Mozart, L’Orfeo by C. Monteverdi, Les Indes Galantes by P. Rameau, L’Isola Disabitata by J. Haydn, Il Ritorno di Ulisse in Patria by C. Monteverdi, Lohengrin by R. Wagner, Il Barbiere di Siviglia by G. Rossini, and My Name is Floria by V. Guastella for I Teatri di Reggio Emilia.

In 2016, together with Emanuele Wiltsch Barberio, he presented at Santarcangelo Festival Lumen, a four-hour concert-happening. For Santarcangelo Festival 2021 he conceived the concert-happening Grand Bois, together with the company Bluemotion. In 2023 he directed and designed sets and lighting of the piece Nina, with Claron McFadden and sound design by Damiano Meacci (Tempo Reale) for Romaeuropa Festival, Festival d’Automne and Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, among others. In 2019 his project Se questo è Levi, won the Special Ubu Award 2019, and Andrea Argentieri (performer) won the Ubu Award 2019 Best Actor Under 35. For the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, he directed and designed sets, lighting and video for Trilogia della città di K. by Ágota Kristóf (2023), a production which won five Ubu Awards, including Best Production; he was personally honoured in the categories Best Direction, Best Set Design and Best Lighting.

 
photo Claudia Pajewski