Treasures from Malta

Joseph Calleja is one of the world’s foremost tenors. He has performed in numerous operatic roles, solo performances and concerts to great acclaim and has scooped up several major international awards, since his early operatic debut at 19 years of age at the Astra Theatre in Gozo. He is a recording artist with one of the top recording labels and has been nominated for the Grammy awards. Much sought after, his life is a whirlwind of appearances on the major stages of the world. From the Met in...

Joseph Paul Cassar is an artist and art historian whose studies have taken him from Africa to Australia, and he now resides and lectures in North America. He is a specialist on African and Modern European art and lectures at prestigious institutions and Universities in and around Washington DC. But his heart lies in the modern period of Maltese art, and amongst his many, many published studies he has produced two landmark publications that chart the rise of modernism in the visual arts ...

Michael Zammit is a poet and a philosopher who has a tendency to look East. He has mastered the difficult language of Sanskrit, and has studied and written extensively about it. He draws lessons from the great philosophical traditions of the East and finds connections with that of the West, using the East as his starting point. He has translated and adapted into Maltese a number of texts including several for the theatre and continues to lecture on both Western and Eastern philosophy in vario...

Vicki Ann Cremona is a prolific and distinguished academic who originally studied and taught French. In time she was drawn to theatre studies and dance, and has approached them from so many angles through her research and papers ranging from the architecture of theatres, to costume, to carnival. She has written extensively on these subjects and much more besides. She is without doubt the leading authority on the history of carnival in Malta and has produced a seminal book on the subject. She ...

Gillian Zammit is elegance personified. Her petite frame belies the incredibly powerful singing voice that has made her a household name. Her musical repertoire is vast and she is equally comfortable singing Baroque opera as she is with 20th century compositions. She has worked alongside such greats as Placido Domingo and Joseph Calleja and sung to much acclaim in the US and across the major capitals of Europe. She is consistently lauded in reviews and while her musical prowess is at its peak...

Philip Farrugia Randon is somewhat of a polymath with a multi-faceted career. He graduated as a lawyer in 1973, while simultaneously broadcasting programmes on radio and tv. Throughout his working life as a lawyer, specializing in banking law, he has engaged constantly with the arts. He is a practicing watercolourist as well as an art connoisseur who has penned countless articles and many books about amongst others, Caravaggio and J.M.W. Turner. He is a published poet and author. He has occup...

Lorenzo Agius is a celebrity photographer of Maltese descent. His roots are in art and art history but early on in his career he took up photography as his medium, working his way up from photography assistant to a fully-fledged freelance photographer. For decades now he has specialized in portraiture and fashion. Throughout his career, he has produced iconic images of practically all the most celebrated actors and models of our time, sometimes revisiting these sitters through different shoot...

Vince Briffa made the cross-over from industry to the academic field, while maintaining an art practice that has established him as one of the leading lights in the contemporary visual arts in Malta. He has attended numerous prestigious international art residencies. He has been invited to participate in countless exhibitions with important international artists and continues to explore the visual arts in both new media, and traditional media such as sculpture and painting. In 2002 he was ins...

Scenic artist Carmel Said has had a remarkable career. From art studies in Malta he went on to obtain further art degrees in London where he worked his way up to become one of the finest scenic artists, producing incredible sets that are beautiful works of painting and sculpture for the biggest names in the industry. From Paris to New York, if you spot a beautiful shop window, say at Louis Vuitton or Dior, it is likely to have been produced by Scenic Sets, his busy London workshop which he fo...

Renzo Spiteri is a multi-percussionist, composer and improviser, a multimedia artist, a field recordist, sound designer, and arts collaborator. In essence he is a sound artist who seems to have no restrictions, such is his versatility and the extent of his experimentation. Literally every and any particular sound can be turned into music in his hands. His practice has taken him all over the world collaborating with persons working in all the arts, from the visual to the performative to the wr...