Christiane Jatahy (b. 1968) is an author, theatre director and filmmaker who lives and works both in Brazil and Europe. Since 2003, she has been developing a body of work that explores border zones between artistic disciplines, between reality and fiction, actor and character.

She grew up in Rio de Janeiro as part of the "Coca-Cola-generation" in the time of the dictatorship in the 70s. The next decade brought profound political changes. Turbulent 80s. showed the importance of art and music in social revolution. These experiences awoke in Jatahy her political awareness and the need to respond to the reality as an artist.

Sharing her life and work between Brazil and Europe she is a ‘a harsh and acute observer of the violent cruelty of our world.’ In her work she addresses contemporary and historical realities of her home land and global burning issues such as postcolonial legacy, racism and inequalities or migration.

In her work Jatahy not only employs the tools of theatre with cinema, but she also blends facts with fiction in a very intricate way. In 2004 she started researching how to play with the borders between the two, by making documentary work and turned that into fiction. For example in the piece Conjugado, about women living alone in a big city, she spoke to many women about their experiences and transformed collected material into a play about society as well as about individual choices. The piece (and later a film) The lack that moves us in 2005, about a group of actors waiting for the last one to arrive was based on a documentary.

Later Jatahy experimented with fictional pieces as starting point, adding elements of reality that would make the work comment on burning social issues. She says: ‘I like to compare my way of working to using a slingshot, estilingue in Brazilian Portuguese. Reality is the stone that gets fired. Fiction is the target I'm aiming for with my slingshot. When the stone hits the target, reality is shot deep into the fiction, resulting in a very realistic sort of fiction.’ 

 The fictional stories she begins with are often textsbelonging to the canon of European literature (such as Shakespeare, Chekhov, Strindberg), referring to the collective knowledge that already exists in the memory of viewers: ‘classical texts represent the experience that comes with growing older: you understand what it means to have a past.’ - claims Jatahy. This is also the case of her newest interpretation of Hamlet (2024), in which the main character is a woman, waking up after four centuries of being the quintessence of male melancholy.

The notion of home is a recurring theme in Jatahy’s work, that she approaches from a wide variety of angles: it's about ancient roots, and being displaced by wars and political circumstances, but it is also about the inherent human capacity for creating new homes and connections. In 2012 Jatahy made In the comfort of your home, a series of interventions, documentaries, performances and video installations by Brazilian artists in the privacy of their homes in London. In 2013, she developed the audiovisual and documentary installation project Utopia.doc, the first in a series of works concerned with the issues of home, exile and migration. The themes of home and belonging will also be central to the work Crossings, a community project in Amsterdam, meant to build conversations between people who otherwise would be unlikely to meet. 

Christiane Jatahy collaborates permanently with many artists – musicians, performers, editors, designers– who she considers family. During Holland Festival 2024 she will present her own work, in collaboration with these artists, and some of her collaborators will present their own projects. Christiane Jatahy sees her role as associate artist to generate new artistic connections, on a small as well as on a big scale.