Virgilio Sieni is a dancer and choreographer who works internationally for major theatrical and musical institutions, art foundations and museums. He trained in art and architecture, devoting himself in parallel to research on the languages of the body and dance. He is one of the founders of the Compagnia Parco Butterfly and in 1992 created the Compagnia Virgilio Sieni, establishing himself as one of the protagonists of the international contemporary scene. Since 2003, he has directed CANGO Cantieri Goldonetta in Florence, a Dance Production Centre for research and transmission on body languages, a space for artists' hospitality and residencies. In 2007, he founded the Accademia sull'arte del gesto, an unprecedented context of training and creation involving people of all ages, backgrounds and abilities, based on the idea of a community of gesture. He has been awarded the UBU prize three times (2000, 2003, 2011), in 2011 the Lo Straniero prize and in 2013 he was appointed Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et de Lettres by the French Minister of Culture. He was Director of the Venice Dance Biennale from 2013 to 2016, developing a four-year plan on the concept of inhabiting the world between polis and democracy, conceiving the city through its metaphysics. His research is based on an idea of the body as a place to welcome diversity and as a space to develop the archaeological complexity of gesture. He creates his language from the concept of transmission and tactility, with an interest in the haptic and multisensory dimension of gesture and the individual, exploring the themes of resonance, gravity and the poetic, political, scientific and archaeological multitude of the body.