A group of people sitting in a circle on the stage floor, engaged in a discussion or workshop, with a dark background and some chairs stacked on the side.
Group of friends smiling and posing for a selfie indoors
Man with a beard talking to two women, one with curly red hair and the other with wavy brown hair, in a room with wooden floors and a black background.
Group of ten people gathered around a dining table in a cozy home, having a meal and conversation.
Audience seated in a large auditorium, watching a performance or presentation.
People sitting on the floor and in seats watching a performance on a stage with a bright light.
Group of people standing in a circle inside a room, some holding phones, engaged in a gathering or discussion.
Two actors dressed in theatrical costumes, one with a painted face, are in a dark setting, with one of them kneeling and the other standing behind, appearing to be in a dramatic scene.
Scene from a play featuring three men in ancient Roman-style white togas with red accents. One man is gripping another by the toga, both appear to be in a heated confrontation, while a third man looks on in the background.
Four actors dressed as traditional comedic characters engaged in an animated scene on stage, with colorful painted backdrop. They have exaggerated facial expressions and costumes, possibly from a theatrical performance.
Group of young people sitting on the floor in a circle inside a theater or auditorium, with red chairs and a black wall in the background.
Five people standing under overhead sparks and showers, in front of an industrial or stage backdrop, illuminated with blue lighting.

Roberto’s Bio

Roberto Prestigiacomo

Founder, ProbabilisticStages · Creator of TransPerformance & Directing Pragmatics · Associate Professor of Theatre & Performance, Trinity University & UNIPA

Roberto is a theatre-maker, director, and performance theorist whose work connects the inner terrain of the psyche with the evolving language of contemporary theatre. He is the creator of ProbabilisticStages, an original methodology that reimagines performance as a living field of emergence, drawing from quantum mechanics, cosmology, philosophy, and depth psychology. At the center of his practice is TransPerformance, a process that weaves symbolic harvesting, subconscious exploration, and spatial dramaturgy into a dynamic system of live composition. Rejecting deterministic models of storytelling, Roberto’s approach replaces fixed scripts with fields of possibility, where performance does not unfold from a pre-set structure but co-emerges through the relationship between space, body, symbol, and presence. His work is grounded in academic training in philosophy (Pontificia Universitas Urbaniana, Rome) and directing (University of California, Irvine) and consistently explores the intersections between performance, metaphysics, and the perception of reality. Through his TransLAB workshops, such as The Inner Field Generator, The Full Harvest, and The Singular Harvest, participants are guided through a deep exploration of the inner world. Techniques like Active Imagination, Asemic Writing, and Image Theatre generate symbolic material that resists literal interpretation and instead activates archetypal resonance. Within ProbabilisticStages, Roberto proposes that performance behaves like a quantum field: meaning arises not from linear causality but from observation, entanglement, and relation. The actor becomes a reader of the field, collapsing potential meanings into live presence, mirroring the observer effect in quantum physics. Space becomes fluid, shaped by attention, memory, and intention. Time loosens into something nonlinear, layered, and cyclical.

As an Associate Professor of Theatre at Trinity University, Roberto teaches Directing, Theatre for Social Change, Performing Human Rights, Physical Theatre, and Dramatic Literature. Internationally, at the Università degli Studi di Palermo (UNIPA), he has led site-specific and community-based TransPerformance projects. His directing work spans more than 70 productions, from classical texts and opera to socially engaged and devised performances. He has developed and directed Forum Theatre projects addressing migration, healthcare, abuse, and environmental justice. Recent work includes Virennu Facennu in Catania, Italy, a Performing Human Rights project created with women of the Comunità di Sant’Egidio; Città Invisibili in Rome; and collaborations with Teatr Brama (Norway/Poland) and Guillermo Gómez-Peña (Mexico). He was also co-founder and Producing Artistic Director of AtticRep, a professional theatre company in San Antonio, Texas. Roberto's work has received support from the Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation, Artists Foundation, and the City of San Antonio. His methodology has been presented and developed through residencies and festivals such as MITEM (Hungary) and FLIPT (Italy), as well as collaborations in Taiwan, India, Mexico, and across the United States. At its core, his artistic and philosophical practice asks: What if performance is not a representation of reality, but a way of creating it? And what happens when we turn our gaze inward, not to escape the world, but to bring forth the invisible layers that shape it?

Man on stage with dramatic lighting, pointing with both hands