I am the first female, of a generation of lawyers and judges, who decided to break the chain and become an artist. I was the first in my family to leave Italy, with a last name—Coppola— more renowned where I was going than where I was coming from. One of my cousins is a judge, a graduate of the LUISS in Rome (where my father had wanted me to study). As a young girl, I saw her enter a court in Aversa, where people, mostly men, bowed reverently to her. My father, too, was a lawyer and described himself a “bureaucrat” but with a passion for history and an obsession with old first-edition books. He dreamed of becoming a historian and always acted like one. He passed on to us all a love and respect for letters. As he used to say, I am the one who sets the pace.

My paternal grandfather, Cipriano Coppola, had a horse business. He was illiterate but smartly dressed, with a passion for cigars. He and his wife, Rosa, lived for a time in a garage in Santa Maria Capua Vetere, Caserta. They had thirteen children, only three of whom survived to adulthood. Of these, my father was the youngest and most hopeful. After graduating from Law School at the University of Naples, he sought his fortune in the North of Italy. He found it not only through a successful career but also in the deep love and respect he shared with my mother, Graziella. In his single, brief trip to the United States, he told me, just before returning home, “you surpassed us; we were not ready for that but we, as family, will keep the pace.” Shortly before he died, he also gave me two pieces of advice: “You are a lioness, find a lion, not a jerk” and “bring your story to the Americans, with the shrewdness of a snake and the lightness of a dove.” My mother earned a degree in psychology at the University of Trieste. During her career as a social worker, she saved a young boy, my brother Alessandro, by convincing my father to adopt him. It was mainly Alessandro, who went on to become a nurse, who took care of my father during his last days, returning the love to him.

I was born in Turin, Italy, in 1978 and lived there until 2013, when I moved to the U.S. More specifically, I was born in Chieri, in the countryside, a town so called from the time of Hannibal, who, upon leaving the land he had destroyed, turned and asked: “Who were you?” (in Italian “Chi—eri?”). My brother, Filippo, and my sister, Marta, the youngest, were born and grew up there too.

As a child I aspired to be a modern dancer (perhaps this is why I am surrounded by young female dancer friends and ended up writing two librettos for the choreographer Barbara Altissimo), but my craving for sweets and chocolate prevailed and my body started to diverge from the ballerina body standards. I was then tempted to follow the family path and study law because I was interested in justice and how to achieve it for everyone. However, after playing my first lead role in high school, as Antigone—in front of a church on the hill in Chieri at the sunset—I understood that Greek Theater has already shown the ways of justice and injustice through poetry and dramatic dialogues. I felt with certainty that Theater would become my new family.

I graduated in 2008 from the Liceo Classico C. Balbo, Chieri and in 2015 from the University of Turin in a dual PhD program with Columbia University. Sadly, I cannot recall a single outstanding teacher who left me with a sense of confidence and gratitude; I had to fight to

make my voice heard (although maybe I was just a very rebellious student). The first writer who became a teacher for me was Joyce Carol Oates, from whom I gained the rights to adapt her Pulitzer-finalist novel Blonde for the stage. Writing this play, called Love Is Blonde in English, taught me everything I needed to know to become a working writer and playwright. It felt like the last play of my career, only written first. The show opened in an “under the radar” production in Turin, at the TPE (Teatro Piemonte Europa) Foundation in 2017 and is in development in New York, where I currently reside.

I had previously written five plays in Italian: The Game of the Princess (produced in Paris, 2011 and published in its French version in 2013); Eroina Mia Eroina (presented at the International Festival of Performing Arts in Algiers in 2012); Ouija (a monologue, which I also performed in Italy in 2011—the nine-minute video is available on YouTube); a translation of David Mamet’s Boston Marriage, in which I played Anne, an aging lesbian in the nineteenth century, trying to regain the favor of her former lover (the well-known play became a drawing-room play, readapted for luxury apartments; it premiered at the TST in January 2012); and The Blue/Rose (produced at the TST and published in Italian).

None of these Italian plays represented a breakthrough, but they helped me develop my craft.

I wrote my dissertation on a matriarchal theory of Aeschylus’s Oreisteia under the supervision of Roberto Tessari, my dramaturgy professor at the time. The cycle of plays shows the first court in history, presided over by the Gods, being established to judge a case of matricide. In the end, I came back to the law, albeit from a different standpoint. I never lost my passion for Greek tragedies and their structure, perhaps because it was already rooted in my name, Argia.

In 2004, I published my first collection of poems, titled The Mystery of the Father. Since then, individual poems have been published in the Italian Poetry Review directed by Paolo Valesio at Columbia University. Poetry has always been the source of my work as playwright. I built my business in NYC as a teacher of Italian and creative writing, working freelance for different institutions until I obtained a part-time position as Professor of Creative Writing at Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin, a position I recently left to focus on my career in the U.S.

While writing and developing Love Is Blonde, I have been the recipient of fellowships from the CRT Foundation, an international non-profit known for supporting artists at the top of their field. I continue to collaborate with them to create opportunities (MasterClasses, conferences, etc.) to discuss the role of creativity today and among the young generations. My first textbook on adaptation, Adaptation: Changing the Point of View, will be published in February 2023 by the Italian publisher De Agostini/Mondadori.

The writers who have most strongly inspired me are Aeschylus, Sophocles, R. Barthes, Samuel Beckett, Lucia Berlin, R. Carver, Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, Elena Ferrante, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ted Hughes, Henrik Ibsen, Sarah Kane, Jamaica Kincaid, Sandor Marai, Joyce Carol Oates, Eugene O’Neill, Silvia Plath, Rainer Maria Rilke, Tom Stoppard, August Strindberg, Peter Szondi, Wisława Szymborska, Simone Weil, Christa Wolf, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats.