Barbara Manzetti is a choreographer, dancer and author. Awarded the Belgian SACD prize in 1996, she has been programmed in numerous choreographic and contemporary art centers in France and abroad.

Barbara Manzetti quickly moved away from the usual creative frameworks for more immediate territories of investigation in an urban environment. The space and time chosen for the performance are often a transitory place and moment; the spectator is physically implicated, and the work becomes at once both object and path. At the same time, she organizes Où Nul Théâtre-Théâtre with Sofie Kokaj, a semi-clandestine structure of artistic intervention. Under the pseudonyms of Tant de Roses and Transport Public the two present their theatrical work on paper, minimal editions, posters, and performance in public and private contexts (Brussels, 1996-1999).

The goal of her research and numerous collaborations is the construction of a suggestive or resonant space. The performative objects often remain ephemeral and evolving, seeking to push the limits of representation, sometimes to the point of embarrassment. She does this through a proximity with the spectator that she is constantly in search of, through a physical or behavioral intimacy or through the reversibility of the "role" chosen by the performer (author, actor, dictator, spectator). A sense  of confusion is put into place between public and private spaces. Her search is a constant attempt to escape existing frameworks by proposing new ones, themselves ephemeral and unpredictable.

Most recently, she has participated in the projects of Jennifer Lacey and Nadia Lauro, Nasser Martin Gousset, Dora Garcia, and Dominique Thirion.

“Barbara Manzetti often speaks of friendship in her work and it seems to me that the demands of this notion determine the essence of her artistic decisions. Her artistic practice is a practice without an exterior, which permanently incorporates its own physical, human, institutional or other environment. This practice cannot separate the time of preparation from the time of performance. (...)

She is a principle of displacement and each place of its exercise is the only possible place.”

Alice Chauchat, afterword to Marrying.Stephen.King.