
Artistic Committee
Programming Section
Valeria Ciabattoni
Italy – RTO lead organisation representative, NID 2023
Director of Sardinia’s Multidisciplinary Circuit
Paolo Cantù
Italy – RTO Representative NID 2023
General and artistic director at Fondazione I Teatri
Francesca Corona
Italy – Artistic director of the Festival d’Automne in Paris
Walter Mramor
Italy – RTO Representative NID 2023
Director of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region’s Dance Circuit
Marie-Josée Beaubien
Québec-Canada – Programming Associate & Manager, Digital Marketing
Agora de la danse – Montréal
Beatrice Horn
France – Conseillère artistique / Artistic Advisor
Maison de la Danse – Biennale de Lyon
Katharina Kucher
Germany – Co-Director / Co Leitung
Internationale Tanzmesse nrw – Düsseldorf
Open Studios
Valeria Ciabattoni
Italy – RTO lead organisation representative, NID 2023
Director of Sardinia’s Multidisciplinary Circuit
Paolo Brancalion
Italia – Dance projects coordinator at L’arboreto – Teatro Dimora / La Corte Ospitale: Emilia-Romagna Residency Centre
Paolo Cantù
Italy – RTO Representative NID 2023
General and artistic director at Fondazione I Teatri
Lorenzo Conti
Italia – Artistic consultant for dance programming at Arts Centre LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura
Francesca Corona
Italy – Artistic director of the Festival d’Automne in Paris
Walter Mramor
Italy – RTO Representative NID 2023
Director of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region’s Dance Circuit
Valeria Ciabattoni
Valeria Ciabattoni has been the artistic director of Ce.D.A.C – the Multidisciplinary live performance circuit of Sardinia / Poets’ Night Festival since 2005.
She is responsible for planning artistic and training events (workshops, master classes, seminars) in the Circuit’s member municipalities.
She is the contact person for the local authorities that have joined the Circuit (currently 27 municipalities and the Region of Sardinia) and she is a project coordinator and the contact person for the regional and national networks to which Cedac belongs. She is an active member of the evaluation committees of dance festivals, especially for the “Vetrina della Giovane Danza d’Autore” (Showcase for Young Dance Talents) and other initiatives of the “Anticorpi XL” network supporting contemporary dance. She is one of the coordinators of the Level I Master’s Degree “Dance and Social Inclusion” 2022/23 in collaboration with the National Dance Academy, which is held in Cagliari at Teatro Massimo.

Paolo Cantù
A graduate in Theoretical Philosophy, over the years he has gained significant managerial and artistic experience ranging across different performing arts disciplines.. He was organisational director of the Fondazione Teatro Piemonte Europa (2007-2011) and of the Teatro Franco Parenti (2012-2014).
In the three-year period 2015-17, he led the Fondazione Piemonte dal Vivo – Circuito regionale multidisciplinare del Piemonte, where he initiated, among other things, the Lavanderia a Vapore Choreographic Centre in residency, in the Turin metropolitan area.
He is currently general and artistic director of the Fondazione I Teatri di Reggio Emilia – Teatro di Tradizione, which deals with production and programming in all fields of live performance, as well as the Open Festival dedicated to contemporary creation.
Francesca Corona
She worked from 2005 to 2013 for PAV, an independent promotion and production organisation based in Rome, curating and organising projects supporting the emerging art community and promoting Italian performing arts abroad.
In Rome, she has also worked at the multidisciplinary Short Theatre festival since its foundation, later becoming its co-director and helping to design its directions and formats (2006-2021). For her work within Short Theatre, she received the 2018 UBU Award as best Italian curator.
After managing the contemporary dance festival DANSEM in Marseille (2016-2019), from 2019 to 2021 she is the artistic consultant of the Teatro India – Teatro di Roma, under the artistic direction of Giorgio Barberio Corsetti, where she has started a multidisciplinary Italian and international programme, radically multiplying and differentiating its audiences and the possibilities of crossing theatre spaces..
Since September 2021, she has been the artistic director of the Festival d’Automne à Paris, one of the most important multidisciplinary events at the international level, which each year presents the most advanced contemporary creation in collaboration with dozens of Parisian cultural institutions.


Walter Mramor
An actor and director, he has worked with Federico Fellini, Giorgio Pressburger, Mario Scaccia, Gianrico Tedeschi, Luciano Berio and Milva. In 1987, he established the theatre company ArtistiAssociati in Gorizia, since 2022 recognised by the Ministry of Culture as a “Theatre Production Centre”.
He manages the programming of the Teatro Verdi in Gorizia, the Teatro Comunale in Cormòns and the Nuovo Teatro Comunale in Gradisca d’Isonzo. Since 2011, he has been president and joint artistic director of the Teatro Duse in Bologna.
He collaborates with the Regional Theatre Agency of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region, supervising the Dance department of the Multidisciplinary Circuit. He was the artistic director of the MittelFest dance programme from 2009 to 2011 and directed and organised the fourth edition of NID Platform, the Italian dance platform held in Gorizia and Nova Gorica in October 2017. Since 2020, he has been the artistic director of Visavì Gorizia Dance Festival, a cross-border contemporary dance festival within the official programme of GO! 2025 Nova Gorica and Gorizia European Capital of Culture.
Marie-Josée Beaubien
Marie-Josée Beaubien’s career has given her a solid knowledge of dance and the arts ecosystem in all its forms. As programme associate and digital communications manager at the Agora de la danse for over 15 years, Marie-Josée Beaubien has always placed the arts and culture at the heart of her personal and professional life.
With an interdisciplinary background holding a BFA in interdisciplinary arts, she began her career by contributing to the development of contemporary art in the Saguenay region, where she co-founded the artist-run center, Le LOBE. In Montreal, she developed her painting practice. She has exhibited works in recognized venues, participated in group exhibitions, and is part of the National Canadian Art Bank collection.
Marie-Josée Beaubien is a cultural player with multiple hats and talents. Her field of experimentation is vast: from cinema to digital art to contemporary music. She shares her expertise through participating on numerous committees and juries and is a member of the board of Dance Against Violence. Her rich trajectory has a common thread: a passion for the interaction between the arts, artists and contemporary gathering places like the Agora de la danse.


Beatrice Horn
After studying clinical psychology and music therapy, I obtained a Master 2 in Performing Arts at the University of Paris. I first chose the world of music production where I developed my taste for setting up and following up projects, before creating a production structure for live shows focused on transversality and contemporary writing as a production manager.
After having carried out various production, programming and management missions, I joined the cultural institution in 2014, as deputy director of the CCN of Roubaix and in 2016, as cultural attachée of the French Institute of Kyoto-Kansai (JP).
Since 2019, I have been working as an artistic advisor at the Maison de la Danse and at the Biennale de la danse de Lyon.
Katharina Kucher
Since 2021 Katharina Kucher is Co-Director of internationale tanzmesse nrw. From 2015 until 2021 she worked at HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, most recently as head of project and contract management. Before that, she worked as a freelance researcher for the Kulturpolitische Gesellschaft e. V. and wrote several studies on cultural development and cultural funding. She has also worked in various theatre companies, including the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and the Schaubühne Berlin, and took on the project management of the 2014 award ceremony for artistic project spaces and initiatives in Berlin.


Paolo Brancalion
Paolo Brancalion works at the Emilia-Romagna Residency Center (L’arboreto – Teatro Dimora | La Corte Ospitale) as a coordinator and tutor for dance projects.
From 2001 to 2005 he collaborated in the organization of Santarcangelo International Festival. From 2002 to 2003, he worked in the organizational staff of the Riccione Teatro collaborating in the organization of the 16th TTV Festival – performing arts on screen and Premio Riccione per il Teatro as head of the ACT! Archives of Contemporary Theater.
For the Network Anticorpi XL he has coordinated since 2015 the ResiDanceXL action – places and residency projects for choreographic creations, and he is a tutor and lecturer of Nuove Traiettorie XL action, a training project dedicated to young choreographers.
He has participated in the creation of networks and projects, in particular: Anticorpi – Network of Festivals and Creative Residencies of Emilia-Romagna in which he is also a member of the promoters’ group; DNAppunti Coreografici support project for young Italian choreographers; E BAL’ – contemporary dance seminars. Since 2019 he has been serving as a member of the selection board of the Open studios section at NID – New Italian Dance Platform: Reggio Emilia – V edition (2019), Salerno – VI edition (2021), Cagliari – VII edition (2023).
Lorenzo Conti
Curator, designer, trainer and author, since 2020 he has been the dance artistic consultant at the Centro culturale LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura, for which, in 2021, he is among the authors of LINGUA MADRE (Premio Ubu Speciale), and in 2022 he directs the first edition of the international Lugano Dance Project festival. Since 2021, he has been collaborating with the MILANoLTRE Festival , dealing with cultural planning and new generations, and, since 2023, assisting the Artistic Direction; he is also curator of the dance sections of the TTV Festival/Premio Riccione Teatro and Spazio Tondelli. As an author, he has been writing about dance in ‘Hystrio’ since 2020 and is part of the Springback project of the Aerowaves Europe network. In 2019 he co-signed his first book The Audience in Dance – Community, Memories, Devices (Scalpendi Editore). In the educational field, he has been teaching History of Theatre and Dance at the Susanna Beltrami/DanceHaus Academy since 2013.
