Roberto Prestigiacomo
Founder, ProbabilisticStages | Creator of TransPerformance | Associate Professor of Theatre & Performance, Trinity University

Roberto is a theatre-maker, director, and performance theorist whose work bridges the inner terrain of the human 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 inspiration from quantum mechanics, cosmology, philosophy, and depth psychology.

At the heart of his work is TransPerformance, a process that fuses symbolic harvesting, subconscious exploration, and spatial dramaturgy into a dynamic system of live composition. Rejecting deterministic storytelling models, Roberto’s approach replaces fixed scripts with fields of possibility, where performance is not pre-structured but co-emerges through the relationships between space, body, symbol, and presence.

Rooted in his academic training in philosophy (Pontificia Universitas Urbaniana, Rome) and directing (University of California–Irvine), Roberto’s work explores the intersections between performance, metaphysics, and the perception of reality. His TransLAB workshops—such as The Inner Field Generator, The Full Harvest, and The Singular Harvest—guide participants through a deep process of innerworld exploration, using techniques like Active Imagination, Asemic Writing, and Image Theatre to generate symbolic material that resists literal interpretation and instead evokes archetypal resonance.

In ProbabilisticStages, Roberto proposes that performance operates much like a quantum field: meaning arises not from linear causality, but from observation, entanglement, and relationality. The actor becomes a reader of the field, collapsing potential meanings into live presence—mirroring the observer effect in quantum physics. The space itself becomes fluid, shaped by attention, memory, and intention. Time becomes nonlinear, cyclical, and multi-layered.

As Associate Professor of Theatre at Trinity University, Roberto teaches courses in Directing, Theatre for Social Change, Performing Human Rights, Physical Theatre, and Dramatic Literature. He also teaches internationally at the Università degli Studi di Palermo, where he has led site-specific and community-based TransPerformance projects.

His directorial credits span over 70 productions—from classical texts and opera to socially engaged and devised performances. He has developed and directed Forum Theatre works addressing migration, healthcare, abuse, and environmental justice. His most 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 based in San Antonio, TX.

Roberto’s work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation, Artists Foundation, and the City of San Antonio. His method has been presented and developed through residencies and festivals including MITEM (Hungary), FLIPT (Italy), and collaborations in Taiwan, India, Mexico, and across the U.S.

At its core, Roberto’s 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?