Tiago Rodrigues

Actor, director, playwright, producer, and, since 2022, director of the Festival d’Avignon in France, Tiago Rodrigues (Portugal, 1977) has created and presented more than 40 performances in more than 25 countries over the past 21 years, being awarded many awards and distinctions.

Tiago Rodrigues crossed paths with the Belgian company Tg Stan at the age of twenty. This is where he developed his acting, writing for the theater, and taste for the collective. As an author and director, he founded the company Mundo Perfeito with Magda Bizarro in 2003. In 2015, he was appointed as director of Teatro Nacional D. Maria II in Lisbon.

Over the past two decades, Tiago Rodrigues has collaborated with numerous Portuguese and international theater artists, as well as choreographers and dancers. He has obtained international recognition and several national and international awards. Some of his most notable works are “Sadness and Joy the Live of Giraffes” (2011), “By Heart” (2013), “Antony and Cleopatra” (2014), “Bovary” (2014), “Ifigenia” (2015), “Sopro” (2017) premiered in Festival d’Avignon, “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists” (2020), “Lovers' Chorus” (2007/2022), “As Far as Pamundur” (2022), created at the Comédie de Genève, and “Hecuba, not Hecuba” (2024) with Comédie-Française.

In 2018, he was awarded the XV Europe Prize for Theatrical Realities. In April 2019, the French Republique distinguished him with the title Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters). In December of the same year, he received the Prémio Pessoa, the most prestigious award for arts and science in Portugal. In December 2021, the Portuguese Government distinguished him with the Medal of Cultural Merit.

He has also been teaching theater in several schools, like the contemporary dance school PARTS in Brussels, directed by choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, the Swiss performing arts school Manufacture, the international project École des Maîtres and Portuguese schools, such as the University of Évora, ESMAE, Balleteatro or the Higher School of Dance in Lisbon. He has been directing research, training, and experimentation projects. Parallel to his theater work, he has written screenplays for film and television, pieces for newspapers, poetry, and essays.

His work was first introduced to the Greek audience with his play “By Heart,” which was presented in 2016 at the Upper Stage of the Onassis Stegi. In the 2023-24 season, he presented the provocatively-titled play “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists” at the Main Stage of the Onassis Stegi, pondering how far we can go before beginning to defend democracy in an overall commentary on the rise of nationalism worldwide. The first collaboration of Tiago Rodrigues with the historical troupe Comédie-Française materialized in 2024 with the presentation of the play “Hecuba, not Hecuba” at the ancient theater of Epidaurus, following its premiere at the Festival d’Avignon. Over the season 2024-2025, he is back to Onassis Stegi and, for the first time, he directs, in collaboration with Argyro Chioti, the Greek actors Nikos Karathanos and Marisha Triantafyllidou to his debut theatrical work, his most autobiographical one, which he began writing in 2006 and completed it in 2020, the “Lover’s Chorus.”

Combining true stories and fiction and weaving together the intimate and the political, Tiago Rodrigues’s plays are deeply influenced by the idea of writing with and for the actors and by his quest for a transformation of our conscience through theatrical tools. His goal is to bring us together, to question our world through the power of words, bodies, and the spectators’ imagination. Either mixing true stories and fiction, rewriting classics, or adapting novels, the theater of Tiago Rodrigues is deeply rooted in the idea of writing for and with the actors, searching for a poetic transformation of reality through the language of the stage.

Tiago Rodrigues’s work has been recognized for his ability to break borders between the theater and different realities, challenging our perception of social and historical phenomena. Throughout his career, he has become a builder of bridges between cities and countries, at once host and advocate of a living theater.