Chiara D’Anna

Catch Chiara D’Anna on Do Radio: Where To Next? with Mike Warwick 4th - 10th May 2026.

Chiara D'Anna is an internationally recognised Italian actress, director, and educator whose work moves fluidly between avant-garde cinema, opera, and the ancient art of physical theatre. Whether inhabiting the psychological depths of a Peter Strickland film or leading a group of performers through the transformative rituals of Commedia dell'Arte, she brings to everything she does a quality of presence, an insistence that to perform is, first and foremost, to be fully alive.

Shaped by a childhood love of storytelling and puppetry, she studied geology before moving to drama, a telling combination that speaks to her lifelong devotion to the earth and to what lies beneath the surface. She holds a PhD in Commedia dell'Arte, and trained with the late Alison Hodge, whose lineage of "core training" for the relational actor she continues to carry forward through her own teaching at institutions including RADA and Rose Bruford College. She has since co-directed operas with legendary conductors such as Iván Fischer at UNESCO World Heritage sites.

Her practice, Natural You, grew from a simple realisation: that she felt most herself when dancing or walking in the mountains. Drawing on three principles from her theatre training - that the self is always transforming, that we exist only in relation to others, and that presence is something to be practised - it invites participants to move without judgment, listen with the whole body, and slip back into what she calls the flow of being.

Chiara sees this work not as performance, but as a way of giving back, to community, to the land, and to the quality of attention that modern life so relentlessly erodes.

Chiara is running a two-day workshop on the art of mask, improvisation, and physical comedy on the 9th and 10th May at Colet House, London. Please follow the link below for more information and to book tickets.