Jorge Lavelli

Jorge Lavelli (born 1932, Buenos Aires) is a French theater and opera director of Italian ethnicity and Argentine origin. The son of Italian immigrants in Argentina, Lavelli has lived in France since the early 1960s. He became a French citizen in 1977.

In 1963 he staged Witold Gombrowicz's play The Marriage, introducing this playwright to the French public. Lavelli later staged Gombrowicz's Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy (1965) and Operetta (1971).

In 1967, Lavelli began a collaboration with Jean Vilar to stage Goethe's Triumph der Empfindsamkeit (Triumph of Sensitivity) and Oscar Panizza's The Cathedral of Love (1969; sets and costumes by the surrealist painter Leonor Fini). From 1987 to 1996 he was head of the Théâtre de la Colline in Paris.