Anna Sica (Anna De Domenico Sica), PhD, is Full Professor of Theatre in the Humanities Department of the University of Palermo.
She holds the courses of Theory and Practice of Acting, History of Theatre Directing, History of Acting. She has received prestigious fellowships from Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, St John's College, Cambridge, Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice.
Since 2006 she is a member of the International Federation for Theater Research (IFTR) Historiography Working Group; since 2014 a founding member of the INIT-International Network of Italian Theater; since 2015 a member of the Board of the Opera House Massimo Theatre, Palermo. She is a distinguished scholar in history of theatre, with special reference to nineteenth century acting. She also specilises in Commedia dell’Arte, contemporary Italian drama and North American and Russian theatre.
She is the authoress of Uptown-Downtown: New York Theater from Tradition to Avant-garde (Milano, 2005) and 'Anton Chekhov's Poetic and Social Realism' (New Theater Quarterly, Volume XXIV, Part 4, November 2008, Cambridge University Press). Sica proposes a historical-philological approach to the study of acting, dramaturgy and theatre direction, and analyses with particular interest the dramaturgy that is most clearly linked to poetry and its cultural contemporary. Her discovery in Cambridge of the most substantial nucleus of the precious personal library of Eleonora Duse (2007) constitutes a significant milestone in theatre studies research. Her work on the discovery and reconstruction of the precious Dusian background is published in The Murray Edwards Duse Collection (Mimesis, 2012). From 2019 she is ANVUR Evaluation Expert.
He has published other significant essays on the acting and the rediscovered intellectual profile of the famous Italian actress, including 'Eleonora Duse tragica sapiente' (Bulzoni, 2009); 'Eleonora Duse's Library: the Disclosure of Aesthetic Value in Real Acting' (Nineteenth Century Theater and Film, 37/2 Winter 2010, Manchester University Press). Her more recent essays have been published by “Biblioteca Teatrale” and “Culture Teatrali”. But the most consistent work of her research is the discovery and decoding of the complex method of the declamation of the great Italian actors and actresses of the nineteenth century. Sica has published three volumes that collect the results she has achieved by reconstructing the long process of decoding of the Italian acting method of la drammatica: La drammatica Metodo Italiano: trattati normativi e testi teorici, (Mimesis, 2013), The Italian Method of la drammatica: its Legacy and Reception, (Mimesis, 2014), L’Arte Massima: la rappresentativa nel novo stile, norme e pratica del metodo italiano di recitazione (1728-1860), vol. I parte prima, (Mimesis, 2017). Recently her works on Chekhov have been translated in Russian and published in / В. В. Гульченко: БАХРУШИНСКАЯ СЕРИЯ (a cura di), Белый квадрат. Чеховские спектакли Джорджо Стрелера. Научный сборник (pp. 13-30). Государственный центральный театральный музей имени А. А. Бахрушина (Museo centrale statale del Teatro “A. A. Bakrušin”).