2026
13th International Mentorship with Silvia Calderoni
& Ilenia Caleo
Photo credit: Pietro Bertola, taken from the show ‘Temporale (a lesbian tragedy)’
International Mentorship 2026
Pan Pan is delighted to welcome Silvia Calderoni & Ilenia Caleo as mentors for 2026 to work with up to four performance makers based in Ireland to develop early-stage ideas for contemporary performance projects.
This is a one-on-one mentorship programme in which each participant will have four mentorship sessions with Silvia & Ilenia (two online and two in Dublin) , as well as an artist bursary and a travel subsidy to each artist to help them to see relevant international work. The participants for 2026 are David Ferreira-Alves, Marta Mcilduff, Jilly McGrath and Renn Miano.
As part of the Dublin Theatre Festival programme, we will be hosting an informal sharing of the ideas and the mentorship process at a day-long public symposium.
The Pan Pan International Mentorship is funded by the Arts Council and Dublin City Council. Dublin Theatre Festival and Istituto Italiano di Cultura are the 2026 mentorship partners.
Photo by Laura Farnetti
Photo by Laura Farnetti
Photo by Laura Farnetti
MEET THE MENTORS
Calderoni-Caleo met in 2012 at the Teatro Valle Occupato during Motus’s Animale Politico Project. They created a nomadic atelier of workshops and artistic residences. Since 2017, they have been teaching in the Visual Arts Laboratory at IUAV University of Venice. Following their participation in the 2018 Biennale College Teatro with a Masterclass, they created KISS, a performance project with 23 performers produced by the Santarcangelo Festival, CSS Udine and Motus Vague. For the Queering Platform of the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong, they co-curate the SO IT IStransnational project (https://www.soitis.art/it). In 2021 they took part in Flu水o, the crossdisciplinary project directed by Alessandro Sciarroni and winner of Italian Council (9th Edition, 2020). In 2022, they created the installation Pick Pocket Paradise for the exhibition “Espressioni con frazioni” at Castello di Rivoli – Museum of Contemporary Art (Torino). They are associate artists of the Italian Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.
In 2023, their performance The Present Is Not Enough premiered in Hamburg, co-produced by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo – Mattatoio | Progetto Prender-si Cura, Kampnagel (Hamburg), Kunstencentrum Vooruit vzw (Ghent), and Motus Vague. For the 2025–2028 triennium, they will serve as co-curators of the Short Theatre Festival (Rome), together with Silvia Bottiroli and Michele Di Stefano. Since 2025, they have been associate artists at BASE (Milan). In 2025, their latest work temporale {a lesbian tragedy} premiered, co-produced by VIELNURVIEL (Ghent), Motus Vague, Emilia Romagna Teatro ERT / Teatro Nazionale.
Beyond their artistic projects, they share, in truth, a bit of everything.
MEET THE MENTEES
David Ferreria-Alves
David Ferreira-Alves is a multidisciplinary theatre artist working across performance, movement, and artistic research. Their practice explores embodiment, ecology, and Afro-Indigenous cosmologies through intimate, site-responsive work that centres the body as a living archive of memory, transformation, and queer experience.
Jilly McGrath
Jilly McGrath is a queer multidisciplinary artist based in Dublin, working across photography, performance, film, and theatre. With an MA in Documentary Photography and a BA in Theatre Studies, her practice centres on storytelling, community engagement, intimate narratives, and a curiosity about people and place, creating collaborative work grounded in connection, presence, and lived experience.
Marta McIlduff
Marta McIlduff is a theatre maker working between Ireland, France and Italy. Selected as one of the “21 artists for the 21st century” by the Northern Irish Office, her work blends documentary, lived experience and experimentation across forms, exploring queerness, borders, olympic diving and her mother. Her recent work ALIENS premiered at Dublin Fringe 2025 (Beyond Borders Award).
Renn Miano
Renn Miano is an anti-disciplinary artist and cultural architect. Their work spans repetition, recital, and record. Using live art, sound, and performance as current containers.
Rooted in Black/queer-ed practices, they construct spaces of encounter that interrogate power, memory, and care, building ephemeral systems that resist, reframe, and reimagine how we gather & why?