Paolo Fantin was born in Castelfranco (Italy) in 1981 and studied stage design at Venice’s Istituto Statale d'Arte. Since 2007 he works closely with the director Damiano Michieletto, with whom he was a finalist in the 2005 International Competition for Stage Direction and Design in Graz (the ‘Ring Award’) for their staging of Le nozze di Figaro. Their collaboration continued with Britten’s children’s opera The Little Sweep in Sicily, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il Friuli, Marco Tutino’s La bella e la bestia in Modena, Nino Rota’s Il cappello di paglia di Firenze in Genoa, Michael Daugherty’s Jackie O at the Lugo Opera Festival, La gazza ladra and Sigismondo at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, Madama Butterfly at the Teatro Regio in Turin and Don Giovanni at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. For Don Giovanni, Sigismondo and Madama Butterfly Paolo Fantin, together with Carla Teti, was awarded the 2011 Premio Franco Abbiati for best stage and costume design. His designs for the Zurich Opera include Lucia di Lammermoor, Il corsaro, Luisa Miller and Poliuto. He has also designed the sets for Michieletto’s productions of Roméo et Juliette and a Mozart/Da Ponte cycle at the Teatro La Fenice, Die Entführung aus dem Serail at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, La scala di seta at the Rossini Opera Festival, Das Land des Lächelns in Trieste, Il barbiere di Siviglia in Geneva, L’elisir d’amore in Valencia, Così fan tutte in Tokyo, Martinů’s The Greek Passion in Palermo, Il trittico at the Theater an der Wien and the Royal Opera in Copenhagen, Un ballo in maschera at La Scala, Milan, Idomeneo at the Theater an der Wien, Gogol’s The Government Inspector at the Teatro Stabile del Veneto and The Rake’s Progress in Leipzig. He made his Salzburg Festival debut, together with Michieletto, with La bohème in 2012 and returned for Falstaff in 2013 and for La Cenerentola in 2014.
