Maria Luisa Usai is an actress, author and director of multidisciplinary plays and projects.
Born in Sardinia in 1985, she lived in Turin, Naples and Rome. She works as an actress with artistic collectives and acting companies, and as an author and interpreter in theater plays.
Since 2015, she has been working in suburban realities with relational community experiments, site specific and multidisciplinary scenic creations. She studied art history, and she merges the languages of Theater, Dramaturgy and Performing Arts. She studied also with Antonio Latella, Teodorus Terzopoulos, Rimini Protokoll, Motus, Marcido Marcidorjs, Roberto Latini, Agrupacion Senor Serrano and Celso Gimenez.
In 2021, she attends the Master in Arts Performative and Community Spaces, Roma Tre University and Pala Expo. She works as an actress with Davide Lodice, Meridiano Zero, Alessia Siniscalchi / Kulturscio'k (it / fr), Riccardo Vannuccini, Emanuela Ponzano. As an author and actress, she creates the original plays: Felicitations, Giulietta Delli Fiori, Madame Misère, False Confidential Diary (Italy and Spain).
She works as an author and artistic director in: PerFormare un Viaggio (Piedmont), Il Cammino Parallelo (Liguria), Io Non Volevo Essere Ofelia and Cross (Sardinia).
She is active in the field of group community artistic performances with workshops, plays and audiovisual projects with teenagers, Rom (Gypsies), migrants, women. She currently collaborates with Ersilia Prosperi, Chiara Murru / Spazio T, Marcella Mancini.
Residency project:
I'll write you something new is a performative epistolary project. Her work questions the way to transform a private act, the writing of a letter, into a public and shared act.
This project is composed of an epistolary part, based on the sending of handwritten letters to strangers, waiting for a response; and a part in the presence of the public, in the here and now of the performative act, where the artist narrates her process, also using the medium of video.
Her goal is to create a performative conference to provoke new writing and to invite the public to write new letters that will be sent.