Artist Name: Caterina Zevola
Residency Dates: 2026
Born: 1989
From: Tuscany, Italy
Lives & Works: Paris, France
Instagram: @caterinazevola | @performissima
Education:
2016 – Post Master Curatorial Studies at Central Saint Martins, UAL University of the Arts London, UK
2015 – Master’s Degree in Architecture ENSA Paris La Villette, France
Bio/Statement:
Caterina Zevola is a Franco-Italian curator based in Paris, specializing in the performing arts. Trained as an architect at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-La Villette, with a specialization in theatre and museum scenography, she later completed a post-master’s degree in Curating Contemporary Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Throughout her career, she has consistently worked at the intersection of multiple artistic disciplines. This transdisciplinary approach now lies at the core of her research and curatorial methodology. Her practice unfolds at the intersection of performance, choreography, visual arts, and sound, with a particular focus on hybrid and experimental formats. She conceives curating as both a relational and structural practice—one that builds frameworks for encounter, circulation, and experimentation. Her research engages with questions of collective experience and spatial activation, exploring how performance can generate temporary communities and disrupt codified spaces.
Caterina has developed programs within major European cultural institutions. She held the position of Cultural Programmer in the Performing Arts Department at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, where she contributed to large-scale and interdisciplinary projects, including the 20th Anniversary Festival of Palais de Tokyo, a major celebratory program marking twenty years of the institution through performances and collective interventions. She also worked within La Manutention, the residency program dedicated to performing artists. She previously served as Residency Coordinator at CN D – Centre National de la Danse, working closely with both emerging and internationally established choreographers while contributing to the festivals Camping and CANAL, thereby fostering international networks within the contemporary choreographic field. She is currently Head of the Performing Arts Department at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles (CWB) in Paris, where she conceives and leads a program dedicated to contemporary performance and hybrid artistic practices.
In 2024, she founded PERFORMISSIMA, an international live arts festival conceived as a deliberately undisciplined and archipelagic platform. Structured as a twelve-hour performative marathon—from noon to midnight—the festival unfolds as a constellation of simultaneous and successive acts, activating multiple institutional and urban sites across Paris. Bringing together around 60 artists from over twenty countries for each edition, PERFORMISSIMA proposes a continuous dramaturgy in flux, where boundaries between disciplines dissolve and performance becomes a space of friction, experimentation, and collective intensity.
