Zia Basbaum

Experience

Lir Academy Training

• Célia Helena Arts and Training Center - 2019
• Bachelor Degree in Theatre (University of São Paulo) - 2023

Other Experience

Zia Basbaum is a Brazilian theatre maker with experience in acting, performance, theatre directing and devising. As a professional actor, she trained for three and a half years at Célia Helena Center of Arts and Training, during which she participated in seven student staging. She also has a Bachelors Degree in Scenic Arts from Escola de Comunicações e Artes (School of Communications and Arts) at the Universidade de São Paulo (University of São Paulo).
Throughout her undergraduate degree, Zia explored: acting; playwriting; costume; make-up and light designing; performance art; and devising. She was the co-author of multiple devised pieces, and the creator-performer of an original durational performance Adubo - Performance com Cartas de Amor. For her final year project, she directed a staging of the existentialist play No Exit, by Jean-Paul Sartre, which she worked on for two years from 2021-2023. Simultaneously, she also directed the devised project: Ordinário - 2 Atores em 5x Sem Juros, a comedy around the Brazilian middle class and the myth of success as a neoliberal notion.

In 2021, she had a directing internship under Eliana Monteiro during the staging process of Estilhaços de Janela Fervem no Céu da Minha Boca, by the collective A Digna.

Professionally, she has worked as an assistant director to Cibele Forjaz in two productions: Estação_3: EMBORAR (2022), part of the triptych A Morte da Estrela, by CIA Barca de Dionísos; and Forjaz’s staging of Il Guarany (2023), for the Municipal Theatre of São Paulo.

In 2023, she was awarded the Haddad Fellowship by the Haddad Foundation, to pursue the Theatre Directing MFA at The Lir Academy of Dramatic Arts.

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