Zia Basbaum is a Brazilian theatre artist from São Paulo, currently residing in Dublin. Their first steps into theatre as a child were quickly fostered into a passionate love and devotion that led to the pursuit of a professional theatre diploma at the Célia Helena Centre for Arts and Education (2016/2019), and a BA in Theatre Arts at University of São Paulo (2018/2023), one of the most prestigious universities in Latin America. In 2023 she came to Ireland as one of the five recipients of the Haddad Fellowship, to obtain her MFA in Theatre Directing at The Lir Academy of Dramatic Arts of Trinity College Dublin.
As a theatre maker, their work takes shape in many forms – acting, performance art, writing – but their main practice, currently, centres theatre directing, both devising new work and staging dramatic text. In the tradition of the Theatre Department of USP, she holds herself as an artist-researcher: within this range of processes, invariably, the work is approached as an investigation of language, form and discourse.
They explore movement and devising methodologies that are at the core of Brazilian theatre, and aligned with text analysis and character work, look to create impactful, lasting visual images, while constructing conceptual, poetic and political discourses within the piece. She’s particularly interested in the interpolation of theatre and philosophy, which they began to explore by staging No Exit, while conducting a parallel research on Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophical work. At the moment, they are in development of a new play exploring the place Water and Death hold in the Irish imaginary, using Gaston Bachelard’s “Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter”, as the conceptual reference.
More than anything, she believes in work driven by a powerful desire, that theatre is an unbelievable pleasure and privilege, and for that it can’t be done without urgency, without need, without craving, without hunger. She believes in a collective practice that builds community, because collectivity and multiplicity can only enrich the work.