Daniele Cipriani, born in 1978, is an artistic director who embodies a new generation of cultural leadership, capable of combining creative vision, profound knowledge of the classical repertory, and entrepreneurial planning. His professional trajectory reveals a rare ability to transform artistic conception into recognizable, solid production systems of strong cultural impact, marked by consistent public success.
Trained at the Accademia Nazionale di Danza in Rome, he embarked from the outset on a path that led him to assume roles of artistic direction and curatorship in prestigious contexts, distinguishing himself through a vision of live performance as a space of dialogue among the arts. His career soon became intertwined with the Festival dei Due Mondi di Spoleto, where he created productions and special projects, contributing to the festival’s international vocation and to the encounter between dance, music, theatre, and the visual arts.
From 2008 to 2010 he served as Artistic Director for dance at the Ravello Festival, an experience that consolidated his profile as a curator capable of reading dance as a contemporary language in dialogue with music, history, and territory. From 2011 to 2015 he was Artistic Director of Positano Premia la Danza Léonide Massine. In parallel, he assumed the artistic direction and curatorship of numerous international dance, ballet, and music galas, presented at major opera houses, festivals, and lyric foundations in Italy and abroad, collaborating regularly with institutions such as Ravenna Festival, Teatro La Fenice di Venezia, Taormina Arte, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Festival Internazionale di Nervi, Auditorium Parco della Musica, Teatro Petruzzelli di Bari, Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Teatro Carlo Felice di Genova, Teatro Lirico di Cagliari, Bahrain National Theatre, and Festival Ljubljana in Slovenia.
Central to his work is collaboration with some of the most authoritative personalities on the international dance scene, including Roberto Bolle, Carla Fracci, Eleonora Abbagnato, Marianela Núñez, Sergio Bernal, Svetlana Zakharova, Carolyn Carlson, Mats Ek, Manuel Legris, Aurélie Dupont, Nicolas Le Riche, Ivan Vasiliev, Polina Semionova, Jacopo Tissi, and many others. Alongside these choreographic collaborations are partnerships with world-renowned musical soloists and performers, among them Beatrice Rana, Mario Brunello and Simone Lamsma.
Among his most significant projects are celebratory productions dedicated to key figures in the history of music and dance, such as Le Creature di Prometeo / Le Creature di Capucci, co-produced with the Fondazione Teatro Carlo Felice and with the collaboration of Maestro Roberto Capucci, who designed the costumes, alongside a structured effort to recover and enhance the choreographic repertory of the second half of the twentieth century. Emblematic is the conception and multi-year development of the international gala Les Étoiles, founded and artistically directed by him, which has over time become a benchmark format at the international level, regularly hosted in major theatres.
Alongside his activity in theatres, Cipriani has developed a strongly innovative curatorial line by conceiving performances designed for monumental and museum contexts, transformed into contemporary performance spaces, such as Galleria Borghese, Castel Sant’Angelo, Museo Manzù, Pantheon, and the Upper and Lower Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi. This attention to the relationship between live arts and cultural heritage has become one of the distinctive traits of his productive poetics.
His artistic mission has always been attentive to crucial issues of the present, translated into projects capable of fostering reflection and collective awareness. Among these are Ogni muro prima o poi cade, at Mercati di Traiano on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall; Donne, at Musei Capitolini for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women; and Pax at Museo dell’Ara Pacis. Initiatives that express a coherent artistic philosophy founded on the meeting of content and form, soul and intellect.
He has received numerous awards and important recognitions for his work, including the Silver Plaque of the President of the Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and the Medal of Roma Capitale.
On 1 September 2025, Daniele Cipriani was appointed Artistic Director of the Festival dei Due Mondi di Spoleto, called to guide its future in continuity with its history and with a renewed vision founded on dialogue among the arts, international scope, and the centrality of cultural experience as a shared good.
