• Roberto Prestigiacomo is a theater-maker whose creative work includes the development of community-based theatre through improvisation and storytelling techniques, and the creation of original physical theater pieces (TransPerformance). Roberto, a produced playwright, was artistic director for Theater With Your Coffee, Potlatch Theater Lab. He has directed (representative): Julius Caesar, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, The Triumph of Love, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Marisol, How I Learned to Drive, One for the Road, Fat Pig, Guys and Dolls, Back of the Throat, Dog Sees God, The Forum Theater Project 08 "Facing San Antonio's Homeless", The Forum Theater Project 09 "Walls and Borders" as well as original works like pastiche, Sabbia and Guernika. Roberto is a member of Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers (SSDC), American Association of Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), and is a native of Rome, Italy.

    Theatrical Productions

    • 8 Created and Directed - Trinity University
    • The Reason of the Insane Ones - Written and Directed - AtticRep
    • The Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni - Directed - Trinity University
    • The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare - New Theatre, Miami, Florida
    • M.F.A., University of California, Irvine
    • Licentia in Philosophy, Pontifica Universitas Urbaniana, Vatican City, Rome, Italy
    • Bachelor in Philosophy, Pontifica Universitas Urbaniana, Vatican City, Rome, Italy
    • Directing
    • Theatre for Social Change
    • Contemporary Theatre
    • Physical Theatre Laboratory

    I have been very involved with our community. In my role of Producing Artistic Director of AtticRep, I define the artistic strategies of the company in response to the cultural and social life of San Antonio and the country. A theater company is a cultural event and a social entity as it reflects and responds to the cultural discourse of its community. In its almost five years of existence, AtticRep has nurtured this discourse within the academic and cultural life of Trinity University and San Antonio. The partnership that AtticRep has developed with the Difficult Dialogue Initiative (http://www.difficultdialogues.org/ ) is a case in point. Difficult Dialogue Initiative is a program designed by Ford Foundation to promote academic freedom and religious, cultural, and political pluralism on college and university campuses in the United States. With AtticRep, I contributed to the work of Difficult Dialogue Initiative (DDI) at Trinity University, and at the same time, I translated and brought to our San Antonio community the same values and objectives.

    The Mission of AtticRep reflects this ideal:

    • Challenging the creative imagination of our community.
    • Creating immediate and intimate performance-driven theater
    • Inspiring dialogue that informs and provokes change.

    In these past five years, I have selected and created programming that responded to our mission and the topic tackled by the DDI. In December of 2006, AR produced The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by S.A. Gurgis to respond to the fall 2006 DDI topic of Religious Particularism. In May of 2007, Fat Pig tackled Compulsory Heterosexuality; in December 2007, Back of the Throat responded to Islamophobia; while in March 2008, we created the first Theater Forum project around the DDI's topic of Culture and Civic Status. In addition to producing plays that addressed the specific topics of DDI, we programmed events that delved into each topic and facilitated a more direct dialogue between our audiences, actors, and experts in the specific fields. Two examples are worth mentioning: after one performance of Back of the Throat, we organized a forum and panel discussion on "Terrorism and Civil Liberties in a Post-9/11 World," featuring panelists ranging from a Trinity Distinguished Professor of Political Science, to an African-American community organizer, to a Lawyer for the ACLU, to the president of the San Antonio Muslim American Association.