Theatre director Luciana Silvestre Fernandes returns to Halifax

Luciana Silvestre Fernandes is a theatre director who’s returning home to Halifax.

She’s here to participate in Neptune Theatre’s Chrysalis Project, which provides practical experience and mentorship to emerging artists within the structure of a professional theatre as well as exposure to the broader theatre community.

Luciana received the 2011 Canada Games Young Artist of Excellence Award in 2016. She was artistic director for Taboo Theatre as well as working with independent companies such as Villains Theatre, Child's Play and Doppler Effect. 

Luciana completed her undergrad education at Dalhousie University, then relocated to British Columbia to pursue her MFA in directing at UBC.

Her work “embraces the philosophy that artists are artisans of reality. In shaping how audiences perceive the world, we can shape how they interact with it. It is through our choices of representation, what we normalize and what we challenge, who we give a voice to, and what questions we deem worthy asking that we challenge unconscious or semi-conscious dogmas of our audiences”.

She brought this philosophy to her most recent work as director of French playwright Jean Anouilh's Antigone, a devised movement-based expressionist adaption of Sophocle's Classic titled Antigones, and Thomas Middleton's Jacobean era play A Yorkshire Tragedy.