Gaia Mencagli is a Danish-Italian theatre artist.
The world is her home, but since 2020 she chose to go back to Italy and make her base in Trieste. Here she performed her solo shows Stories of Eggs and Flour and It’s Red! at Hangar Teatri, where she also taught theatre to kids and adults. Now she is working as a puppeteer at the Rossetti Theatre with the Marionette di Podrecca while cultivating independent projects of her own.
Previously Gaia was living in Minneapolis where she worked as an actor and an educator. There she collaborated with several theatre companies as an ensemble member on original shows, and she worked on her first solo show It’s Red! thanks to an artistic residency at Open Eye Figure Theatre, which was later developed at the Grotowski Institute in Poland.
She completed her degree at Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre in California in 2018, and previously studied in Denmark – Vox Viva, Move´n´Act, and the Danish Folk School RyHøjskole – and in Italy – with the theater company “Tutti in Scena”, directed by Pier Maria Cecchini. More recently (June 2023) she completed a two-year seminar-based movement training program called Danza Sensibile by Claude Coldy.
Gaia believes in building bridges. Her experiences in Italy, Denmark, and the US have taught her that collaborations across cultures and countries are possible, beautiful, and worth pursuing. The theatre she wants to make is imaginative, explorative, genuine, and engaged in a dialogue with the community. She loves telling and listening to stories and believes in cultivating nests of creativity from which new work can take off and fly.