Paolo Emilio Landi Italian director, television journalist Date of Birth: 02.11.1959 Country: USA

Biography of Paolo Emilio Landi

Paolo Emilio Landi is an Italian director, television journalist, and professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, USA. He graduated with honors from the Theater Faculty of the University of Rome. As a television journalist, Paolo has worked on every continent except Australia. He has directed documentaries for the Italian State Television. Paolo Emilio Landi is one of the most frequently invited foreign directors in Russia, where his creative aesthetics have found fertile ground and his productions have remained in theater repertoires for many years. With a diverse range of interests, Paolo Emilio Landi prefers theater and television, successfully balancing both spheres of activity. He is proficient in several languages, including Russian, English, and French. One of Paolo Emilio Landi's documentaries is about the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Alexy II. Since 1982, Paolo has been working as a journalist and director for RAI2, the second channel of Italian television. His early works include a series of documentaries, reports, and interviews on the topic of Protestantism, as Paolo Landi was born into an Italian Protestant family. While working on his programs, Paolo Emilio Landi travels around the world, visiting Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. His shows have been broadcasted in France, Switzerland, and the United States. Some of his best works include the documentaries "The Volcano That Could Wake Up" (dedicated to the civil war and genocide in Rwanda), "Sudan - A Fragile World," "Putin's Russia," "The Name of God" (about the religious war in the Moluccas), and a series of interviews dedicated to the theme of Time - "Time for...". He has also directed the documentaries "Bank for Friends" for RAI2 and the fantasy film "On the Border" based on the book by Leonardo Frankini for RAI3. Since 2001, Paolo Emilio Landi has been a member of the Italian Journalists Union. Paolo Emilio Landi began his theatrical career at a young age of 16, starting as a sound engineer and lighting artist, then becoming an assistant director to Luigi Squarcina, Augusto Tucchi, Gabriele Lavia, Giulio Bosetti, and participating in major productions that marked the activity of Italian drama theater in the 70s and 80s. Paolo Emilio Landi graduated from La Sapienza University in Rome, majoring in American Literature, with a dissertation on one of Tennessee Williams' late plays, "A Game for Two", which inspired him to create a play based on this work. The world premiere of his play took place in 1989 at the Arts Festival in Todi, Umbria. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, new opportunities opened up for Western cultural figures in the post-Soviet space, and Paolo Emilio Landi was no exception. In the early 90s, he was invited to direct a play at the Omsk Drama Theater. Thus began his creative life in Russia, with numerous visits to the country and theatrical productions in Omsk, Samara, Saratov (the production of the play "Italian Marriage" by E. De Filippo at the Saratov Youth Theater earned the lead actress, Elena Vovnenko, the State Prize of the Russian Federation in 2003), and in the Baltic cities of Vilnius and Riga. In the late 90s, Paolo Emilio Landi made his first visit to the United States, to the Repertory Theater in Milwaukee, where he directed a production of Carlo Goldoni's play "The Servant of Two Masters", which was later recognized as the best theatrical event of the year. Shortly after, he began his ongoing collaboration with the University of Richmond in Virginia, where he was invited to teach theater studies and continue his directorial experiments with his students. Paolo Emilio Landi's creative preferences are wide-ranging, from the classics of Italian theater (Carlo Goldoni, Enrico Scaletta, Luigi Pirandello, Edoardo De Filippo) to plays by contemporary English playwrights such as Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn, as well as absurd theater and musicals like "Lady's Night". The consistent success of Paolo Landi's productions lies in the delicate combination of tragedy and comedy, psychological depth in the spirit of Stanislavsky, and skillful use of music, choreography, and video.