Pagotto, Cathia

Cathia Pagotto is a director and designer working in theater, dance, film and visual arts. She has worked with numerous dance, theatre, and film productions in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Istanbul, Portland, Toronto, Turin, and Montreal; among them, L.A.-based Echo Theatre group's Uncle Vanya and One-Acts. Pagotto has designed and choreographed for NY-based visual artist/director Jonathan Berger on his epic visual theater projects Noble Fir (L.A.), Souvenir (NY) and I'm Too Sad To Tell You, Bas Jan Ader and The Short Way Down (co-direction), as well as Portland-based director Scott Palmer (founder and artistic director of the Glasgow Repertory Theatre) on Just One More Dance (Portland).

Pagotto specializes in devised, collaborative and non-text-based work, and has collaborated extensively as co-director with Chilean artist Marcela Oteiza on numerous projects including 101 Alvarado, an ongoing photonovella; A Year Ago Today, an adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, made and performed in the California desert; and the current Binding project, being showcased at the Digital Resources for the Humanities & Arts 2008 at the University of Cambridge, UK. In 2006, Pagotto directed her first text-based play, Woyzeck, at Oregon State University.

In 1999, Pagotto was awarded a full scholarship to attend the California Institute of the Arts in Specialization in Design for the Theatre. During this time, Pagotto worked for theatre director and filmmaker Janie Geiser, and she was design assistant to Broadway set designer, Christopher Barreca.  

Pagotto taught performance theory and design at Oregon State University, USA from 2003-2006, and has also lectured and given workshops and lectures at the modern dance conservatory of the Mimar Sinan University in Istanbul, Turkey, and at Concordia University in Montreal.

Pagotto is currently the artistic director of Landed 2, a new theatre collective that recently received a production grant from the Quebec Council of Arts and Literature for their upcoming project, The Suspension of Wait. She is also a collaborator with Public Recordings, the Toronto-based choreographer Ame Henderson's company, as designer.