Gianna Marullo is a theatre director from Greenville, South Carolina, where she attended the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, before heading to the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where she is currently pursuing her B.F.A. in Directing.
Her work is incredibly language based with her deep love of words instilled early by a family of readers and writers who ingrained language’s unique power to transform the intricacies of thought and feeling into tangible means of communication. She has always been fascinated by rhetoric and the way we use words to get what we want, leading her to develop a strong skillset and earnest love for tackling heightened and poetic texts within the theatre.
She is also extremely passionate about specificity in the way we make work, holding a strong belief that theatre has the potential to be a soul nourishing practice rooted in collective creation and communal growth. She endeavors to create artistic community by intentionally crafting the culture of her rehearsal rooms and upholding values of honesty, deep listening, enthusiasm, and expansiveness.
During her time at UNCSA, she has had the privilege of directing a wide variety of work, from tackling time-honored classics to collaborating with playwright, Hansol Jung, on a reading of her new play in development, Double Think. She has also worked professionally, serving as Carl Forsman’s assistant director on Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing at Piedmont Shakespeare Company. This year, she is absolutely thrilled to be directing her thesis production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches. In addition, she will be directing a production of The Tempest by William Shakespeare and developing a new play, Temporal Window of Retrieval, with Helena Hsiu as a part of UNCSA’s Keys to the Kingdom series.
