Ligiana Costa is a Brazilian singer, composer, stage director, and musicologist whose work lies at the crossroads of art, thought, and transformation. Her creative practice is rooted in the voice — as sound material, embodied presence, and a vehicle for meaning — and unfolds across multiple languages: from the operatic stage to experimental music, from academic research to dramaturgical invention.
She holds a PhD in musicology, with a specialization in seventeenth-century Venetian opera, developed through a joint program between the University of Tours (France) and the University of Milan (Italy). She approaches opera as a space for experimentation, where history, politics, and imagination intertwine. Her research and artistic work explore hybrid forms and plural narratives, with a focus on contemporary critical perspectives such as ecofeminism and decolonial thought.
Ligiana studied classical voice at the University of Brasília, pursued advanced studies in baroque singing at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, and earned a master’s degree in musical philology from the Musicology Department in Cremona. Alongside her academic career, she has developed a distinctive path as a singer-songwriter and composer, releasing several albums: De amor e mar (recorded between Paris, São Paulo, and Brasília), Floresta (produced by Letieres Leite), the electronic duo NU (Naked Universe) with Edson Secco, the vocal project Eva, and more recently Sá – um oratório para a Terra, where body, ritual, and song converge in response to urgent environmental concerns.
She is the author of several scholarly books published by Unesp and Edusp university presses. In 2018, she was awarded the prestigious Flaiano Prize in Italy for her book Corego, a study of the seventeenth-century Italian treatise of the same name, developed during her postdoctoral research at the University of São Paulo.
For over five years, Ligiana has served as institutional dramaturg at the Theatro Municipal de São Paulo, where she writes program essays, provides staging analysis, and designs public engagement strategies for opera productions. She has also collaborated internationally as a dramaturg, working with companies and directors such as the Festival Amazonas de Ópera, Colombia’s Compañía Estable, Carla Camurati, William Pereira, Cibele Forjaz, and Lisenka Heijboer Castañón (at the Juilliard School).
In 2025, she was selected for the Women Opera Makers program at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, led by Katie Mitchell, and completed a dramaturgy residency at the Opéra Comique in Paris — two formative experiences that deepened her engagement with contemporary opera creation.
Ligiana has increasingly developed an original directorial voice, grounded in listening, embodiment, and presence. In 2024, she created and directed O Grão da Voz, a hybrid music-theatre work conceived in collaboration with sopranist Bruno de Sá. In July 2025, she made her directorial debut at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris with Marias do Brasil, a poetic-documentary performance inspired by the lives and repertoires of two pioneering Black Brazilian opera singers — a production acclaimed by both critics and the public.
Navigating seamlessly between classical and contemporary languages, academic rigor and artistic intuition, Ligiana weaves a practice devoted to beauty, deep listening, complexity, and transformation.