Gian Pietro Calasso

Gian Pietro Calasso is a director, screenwriter, photographer, and University professor of performing arts. A Florentine by birth, then also American citizen, he has studied and worked in Italy as well as England, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, United States, and Japan. After completing with honors his classical studies (High School diploma with highest grades in Italy; Rome University, degree cum laude and publication) he embarked on specialized studies in the performing arts at the Drama School of Yale University and at the Actors Studio in New York. He completed his apprenticeship as a director, actor, choreographer and writer with teachers such as Bertolt Brecht, Lee Strasberg, Marcel Marceau, Alexander Sahkaroff, Akira Kurosawa, Luigi Squarzina, Mario Monicelli, Franco Zeffirelli and Billy Wilder. He has written some thirty films and television scripts and has directed as many works in a wide range of fields: cinema, TV, legitimate stage, opera, and radio. He also won two international awards: MystFest for his screenplay "Covenant with Death", and the prize awarded by Japanese critics as best director of the year in Japan for his staging of Pirandello's Henry IV. He's author of twenty publications on a variety of topics, from Western avant-garde to classic Japanese theater, cinema, psychology, opera librettos and short novels. In the field of photography, he has worked with newspapers and magazines, has created advertising posters, and is author of a bilingual (English and Italian) photographic art book entitled: "Narcissus' Eros", published by Mondadori, Leonardo Arte. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles purchased two hundred of his photographs. He has taught "Directing" and "Screenwriting " in five Universities, both in Italy and USA, e.g. UCLA in Los Angeles, and University Roma 1 "La Sapienza", in Rome where he is presently under contract to teach "Digital Directing" and "Screenwriting".