Born in Milan. Studied set design at Milan’s Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera , where she subsequently taught costume design.
Luisa Spinatelli made her debut as a set designer with Francesca da Rimini (Teatro alla Scala, 1965). Spinatelli has subsequently collaborated with La Scala on numerous occasions, designing Lamberto Puggelli’s productions of Attila (1975), La forza del destino (1978), Andrea Chénier (1982), Adriana Lecouvreur (1988) and Fedora (1993), Lev Dodin’s production of Mazepa (1989) and George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2003). The set designer has also worked on productions of Carmen (Caracalla, 1983), Aida (Cairo Opera House, 1987, and the Olympic Stadium in Montreal, 1988), The Maid of Orleans (Teatro Regio, Turin, 2002), Luisa Miller (Palermo, 2003) and Anna Bolena (Wiener Staatsoper, 2011).
Luisa Spinatelli has also produced sets and costumes for ballets including The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, Clavigo, Paquita, Tchaikovsky, Raymonda, La Dame de pique, La Chauve-souris, À bientôt, Proust, ou Les Intermittences du coeur, Liebeslieder Walzer, Orpheus and Eurydice, The Lady of the Camellias, Coppélia and Giselle, working together with such choreographers as Pierre Lacotte, Roland Petit, Natalia Makarova, Patrice Bart, Asami Maki , Dominic Walsh and Derek Deane. Luisa Spinatelli has designed productions for theatres including the Berliner Staatsoper, the Opéra de Paris, the National Theatre in Tokyo, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Tokyo’s Bunkamura Theatre, Poland’s Teatr Wielki – Opera Narodowa and the National Theater of Korea among others.
Moreover, Luisa Spinatelli has taken part in productions of musicals including Peter Pan (sets and costumes; choreography by Gheorghe Jancu, Teatro Piccolo, Milan, 2000), Kiss Me, Kate (sets and costumes; choreography by Amedeo Amodio, production by Lamberto Puggelli, Teatro Regio, Turin, 2001) and Shrek the Musical (sets and costumes, Casino de Paris, 2012).
In 1989 Luisa Spinatelli was awarded the Léonide Massine Prize (Positano).
