The award ceremony will take place during the 54th International Theatre Festival, scheduled in Venice from 7 to 21 June, in the Sala delle Colonne at Ca’ Giustinian. The choice brings into dialogue two artistic trajectories distant in generation and geography, yet united by a strong poetic drive and by a shared understanding of theatre as an emotional and political experience.
Emma Dante: a necessary theatrical language
“An artist who has been able to bring Sicily to the forefront,” writes Willem Dafoe in the motivation for the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. Starting from Palermo, Emma Dante has gradually shaped an autonomous and unmistakable stage language, deeply rooted in the Italian cultural and literary tradition – from Pirandello to Scaldati – while at the same time radically reinventing it through a rigorous linguistic and formal exploration.
A graduate of the Accademia Silvio d’Amico, after an initial phase as a performer, she founded the Sud Costa Occidentale company in 1999. Her theatre confronts complex and often painful themes—family, death, violence, love, dreams—rendered through an essential scenic writing imbued with irony and empathy, and marked by a close attention to human and social marginalities. Her presence at Biennale Teatro dates back to 2004 with La scimia, based on a text by Tommaso Landolfi.
Over the years, Emma Dante has worked with major international theatres and festivals, from the Piccolo Teatro to the Comédie-Française, from the Avignon Festival to Teatro alla Scala, alongside her work in opera, cinema and narrative writing. At the 2026 Festival she will present the world premiere of I fantasmi di Basile, returning to the imaginative universe of Neapolitan writer Giambattista Basile, following the trilogy La scortecata, Pupo di zucchero and Re Chicchinella.
Mario Banushi: intimacy as a political gesture
The 2026 Silver Lion is awarded to Mario Banushi, playwright and director who has quickly established himself on the international scene through a theatre made of silences, images and minimal actions, where autobiographical experience opens onto a universal resonance. Dafoe describes his work as “a poetic and elliptical language,” capable of traversing grief, memory and family traditions without ever yielding to explanatory narration.
Born in Greece in 1998 and raised in Albania during his early childhood, Banushi trained at the Athens Conservatory. He made his directorial debut with Ragada, created inside a private apartment during the pandemic, before being invited to collaborate with the National Theatre of Greece. This led to Goodbye, Lindita, a production that remained on stage for three years and went on to tour internationally, followed by Taverna Miresia, the third chapter of a trilogy acclaimed at major European festivals.
At the 54th International Theatre Festival, Banushi will present the complete trilogy for the first time under the title Romance Familiale. The project confirms a poetics in which intimacy intertwines with a political reading of the present, deeply rooted in Balkan culture yet capable of addressing a global audience.
With the assignment of the 2026 Lions, the second Biennale Teatro under Willem Dafoe’s direction brings together a recognised master of the Italian stage and one of the most incisive voices of the new European generation, reaffirming theatre as a space of necessity, vision and resistance.
