Ilenia Cipollari is an Italian/British actor, singer, researcher and teacher working across performance art, film, and theatre. She trained in jazz vocals at the Mabellini Conservatory of Pistoia, Italy, and has extensive international experience in avant-garde theatre companies and early music ensembles.

From 2023 to 2025, she was a member of Idrîsî Ensemble, a music collective dedicated to the performance and study of rare, previously unrecorded medieval repertoire through music archaeology, medieval literature, and postcolonial historiography. With Idrîsî she explored repertoires spanning ancient Greek polyphony, Old Roman chant, Corsican traditions, and Troubadour song from the 4th to 14th centuries.

She was a long-term collaborator of the critically acclaimed Song of the Goat Theatre Company, working with artists such as Gambian multi-instrumentalist Sona Jobarteh, Corsican male polyphonic ensemble A Filetta, and jazz singer Anna Maria Jopek. From 2019 to 2024 she collaborated with the Musarc choir collective, performing works by Holly Herndon, Jennifer Walshe, Neil Luck, and others under the direction of Jack Sheen, David Young, Cathy Heller Jones, and with Melanie Pappenheim.

Her performance career includes appearances at Bold Tendencies, LCMF (London Contemporary Music Festival), Leuven Artefact Festival, the International Festival of Chamber Music in São Paulo, Yale Repertory Theater’s No Boundaries series, Tbilisi International Theater Festival, Battersea Arts Centre, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Tramway Arts Centre, and multiple editions of BRAVE Festival.

Recent highlights include the critically acclaimed performance work Sirena (praised for its “sublime” vocals), being named a Bloomsbury Festival New Wave Artist in 2025, and receiving the 2024–25 British School at Athens Arts Bursary.

Cipollari is currently undertaking a PhD (2023–27) at University of the Arts London (Camberwell, Chelsea, Wimbledon Colleges). Her research interests include gig theatre, post-dramatic theatre, trauma-informed and body-centred practices, anti-colonial and anti-racist critique, and feminist and post-Marxist relational politics.