After graduating in German Literature, Michele Di Stefano undertook a course of self-taught study and research on movement, which led him to found the mk group at the end of the 1990s. He is both a choreographer and performer within the group. His group was immediately invited to participate in the most important contemporary performance festivals in Italy and abroad, with dates in countries including Japan, Great Britain, Germany, Indonesia, the United States, Spain and Portugal, alongside a constant stream of performances in Italy.
Recent productions include: Instruction series (in collaboration with Xing), Around the World in 80 Days (with two dancers from the William Forsythe Company and several Italian artists), Four Colonial Dances at Close Range and Grand Tour, Impressions d’Afrique (also presented at the Biennale Danza in 2013) and Robinson (in collaboration with visual artist Luca Trevisani, to music by Lorenzo Bianchi Hoesch, also presented in four different versions at the Museion in Bolzano). He re-staged Giuda, a project commissioned by Antonio Latella and performed in Berlin at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI) as part of the performance cycle ‘Anatopies: For a Critique of Spatial Reason’.
The Festival Internazionale di Santarcangelo 2014 invited Michele Di Stefano, together with the choreographers Cristina Rizzo and Fabrizio Favale, to create a special project for the festival’s dance programme. The shows are accompanied by an intense programme of conferences, workshops and experimental works, such as Clima (in collaboration with the Teatro di Roma and Santarcangelo dei Teatri – a performance that involves audience participation), the Accademie Eventuali in Bologna with Margherita Morgantin (Museo Storico della Città di Bologna, Fondazione FURLA and Carisbo), Reform Club for the Paolo Grassi School in Milano (already presented at the Biennale Danza in 2011), and many more.
Michele Di Stefano received in 2000 the Danza&Danza award for contemporary dance and at the Biennale Danza 2014, the Leone d’Argento for dance.
In 2014 he created Line Rangers for Korea National Contemporary Dance Company in Seoul and Upper-East-Side for Aterballetto, followed in May 2015 by the restaging of his e-ink realised within the project RIC.CI.