Fernanda Taddei (Rio de Janeiro, 1978), is an artist and actress, graduated in film studies, living in São Paulo and working in Teat(r)o Oficina since 2015. Mother of Lina, 8, and Vera, 5. Besides acting in several plays of the company, she works as a project conceiver and collaborator, and is a free, passionate researcher of Oficina’s language and history. Co-director, with Marília Piraju and Rodrigo Andreolli, of BORI – rite for black theatrical presentness and ancestry of Oficina. She is also an activist in the struggle for the Bixiga River Park and executive director of the Association Teat(r)o Oficina Uzyna Uzona.

Teat(r)o Oficina

Founded in 1958, Teat(r)o Oficina is the longest living theater company in Brasil. It has gone through different political and aesthetics contexts and proposed different researches and movements in theater performance. Its longevity is due to a strong sense of transmutation, a radical commitment to present local/world political scenarios at all times and the rooting of its building in the same address since 1961: Jaceguay street, 520, Bixiga neighbourhood, São Paulo. Its course, which involves hundreds of artists across decades, merges with the figure of José Celso Martinez Correa (1937-2023), one of the company’s founders and its director since the early 70s, who died after a tragic fire in his apartment. The singular relation, built throughout the years, between Oficina’s architecture and language made it listed as tangible and intangible Brazilian heritage. Its latest architecture project, designed by architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992) and opened in 1993, results of her long lasting collaboration with the company, started back in 1969. The land around the theater’s building, which has been object of a 45 year long struggle of the company, with local politicians and neighbourhood alliances against real estate speculation, has finally been expropriated in 2024 to become a public park. the Bixiga River Park’s project will reopen part of Bixiga river’s course, which has been piped 4 meters underground for over a hundred years.