Carla Zanin
Carla Zanin is a visionary creative, opera director, and video scenographer, as well as a lecturer and researcher in Horizon Europe projects. She is the founder and artistic director of the XR Festival Florence and the Florence International Choir & Orchestra Festival, a project manager and scientific coordinator for Erasmus+ KA2 projects, and a teacher in communication, marketing, and soft digital skills within professional training programs. Additionally, she is the founder and president of Opera Network.
She is the mastermind behind groundbreaking conceptual projects dedicated to the digital transition in the performing and creative arts, including Virtual Stage – Visions and Uncharted Horizons for a New Live Performance, In Media Stat Virtus, and Metamorphoses (France), all funded by the Erasmus+ KA2 program, as well as Hybrid Opera and Immersive Performance, financed by the Italian Ministry of Culture, and Meta Opera System.
She carries out multi-transdisciplinary researches in the musical theatre, between Humanistic and Technology, physical/biological and digital. The current research “VR impact on dramatic storytelling in Opera live performance - Emotional content / representation between physical and digital” focuses on the study and experimentation of the aesthetic effects of implementing virtual environments into live performances. She is also engaged in another ambitious research project entitled "Transcultural Storytelling in Digital Times", a transcultural investigation into poetic and musical traditions between Ancient Greece and Africa, juxtaposing myths and legends within the oral tradition, mediated by VR technologies. The activity is centered within Kenyan communities, spanning rural inland villages, coastal settlements, and major urban centers such as Nairobi and Mombasa, as well as at select ancient vestiges emblematic of western-Greek culture.
Her work as a creative director is characterized by the creation of innovative, hybrid, and site-specific projects that intertwine music, poetry, visual arts, theater, dance, and XR/digital systems, offering an ideal dialogue between philology and technology while embracing diverse cultures and traditions.
Among her most recent productions and multimedia projects, for which she curated the stage direction, video design and costumes, are:
- Dante, Orfeo e il viaggio khthóniosfrom L’Orfeo by Monteverdi(Firenze Chiostro Santa Maria Novella 2021, Umbria Tour 2024, Naxos 2024, Athens 2024)
- Orpheus entangledfrom L’Orfeo by Monteverdi (Lyon 2023, Malaga 2024)
- Οδυσσέας storia di vendetta e di potere from Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria by Monteverdi (Firenze Chiostro Santa Maria Novella 2022, Cattedrale dell’immagine 2023)
- Le Nozze di Figaro by Mozart (Puglia tour 2022, Croatia, Umbria Region and Firenze 2023)
- Ομηρος, Dante & Bob Dylan: Music and Poetry through the millennia (Naxos 2022-2023, La Coruna 2023, Athens 2023).
- Orpheus & Lwanda (Nairobi 2023, Firenze Cattedrale dell’immagine 2024)
- ÉKSTASI, transcultural storytelling across time, space & media (Umbria Tour 2024, Nairobi, Mombasa 2024).
As an author, she wrote the opera Maria Callas, The Immortal Heroine (staged with great success in Athens 2023, for the hundredth anniversary of Callas’ birth), for which she also meticulously directed the stage production, immersive video design, costumes, and musical program.
She conceived the music and theater opera Francesco, lo primo frate minore (Firenze Basilica di Santa Croce 2021, Umbria Tour 2023, Duomo di Firenze 2024), for which she designed the immersive video scenography and curated the documentary video dedicated to environmental sustainability.
She conceived and directed the video production for:
- La Musica della Commedia Dantesca, as collaborator (Firenze 2015, Tour europeo 2016)
- Motezuma by Galuppi (Festival Pucciniano 2018, Salzsburg Festival 2018)
- L’incoronazione by Poppea by Monteverdi (La Spezia, Firenze 2019)
- Don Giovanni by Mozart (Montepulciano, Firenze 2019-2020),
- Messiah by Haendel, online video production (YouTube 2022)
Within the XR Festival Florence—a digital, hybrid, international, and multidisciplinary platform dedicated to research, experimentation, production and training in Extended Reality applied to the visual and performing arts—she conceived three distinct sections, each featuring a prototype of immersive and interactive artistic creations and performances. These prototypes leveraged Extended Reality, with a particular focus on 360° video, Augmented Reality (AR), and Virtual Reality (VR) applied to art, opera, and immersive video mapping.
The XR Festival has served as a model of best practices, fostering a multidisciplinary synergy among researchers, lecturers, artists, musicians, technologists, XR experts, students, and Ph.D. candidates. A key aspect of its success lies in the active collaboration of participatory communities, which were deeply engaged at every stage of the experimental process—from preliminary training to conceptual ideation and analysis, from design and development to problem-solving, application, and the creation of final case studies. This dynamic interaction has yielded groundbreaking results.
Through these innovative concepts, she contributed to revolutionize training processes, aesthetic language, and audience interaction, fundamentally transforming the way performances are conceived and produced. This paradigm shift has not only reduced environmental impact but has also fostered a more inclusive and collaborative approach to creative production.
She is the Founder & Artistic Director of the Florence International Choir & Orchestra Festival, in ten years of activity she brought to Florence more than ten thousand musicians, from the five continents performing in the most famous and astonishing Florentine venues. She is the founder and president of Opera Network Firenze, an institution skilled in opera productions and in the training of young talents and professionals in all the performing arts. She is the general director, artistic and project consultant of Ensemble San Felice.
She has collaborated with the training academies of important musical and theatrical institutions, such as: the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in Florence, the Metastasio Theater in Prato, the Pucciniano Festival Foundation in Torre del Lago, the Music & Art Study Center of Florence, and with institutions and companies such as Giunti Psychometrics, Fabbrica Europa Foundation.