Sybille Cornet was born in Verviers (Belgium) in 1968. She lives and works in Brussels. She is a writer and stage director. She studied at the Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique in Liège and in 2005 received a Master’s degree in Performing Arts at DasArts (Amsterdam). She has been awarded several writing grants, including a grant for Villeneuve-Lez-Avignon to write a stage version of her novel L’empêchement (2008), and for Empac in Troy (New York) to work with Rodrigo Pardo on writing the text for his project Flat (2012).
In 1998 she established her theatre company Welcome to Earth. Apprehending theatrical creation as a global process, she both writes and directs her plays. Exploring the father-daughter relationship, in 2000 she wrote and directed her first play titled Nos Pères which was based on real testimonies. In 2001, drawing on Chekhov’s Platonov, she created a theatrical performance, Que le bruit du monde cesse, which investigates power relations in love games. In 2002, drawing on Arnulf Rainer, she wrote Rien ni personne, a play that explores western man’s fraught relationship with his body. In 2008, she staged Le genévrier, a play for children inspired by a tale by the Brothers Grimm, which received a special mention from the jury at the Huy festival for its “refined and powerfully suggestive staging”. That same year she put on several stage versions of her written serial L’empêchement. In 2009 she put on Une jeune femme disparaît for the Musée des Arts Contemporains (Mac’s), a play that works as an introduction to contemporary art, aimed at teenagers and performed exclusively in high school classrooms. In 2012, she wrote and staged La vie difficile et joyeuse d’Ismaël Dupont, a play-cum-lecture for all audiences bearing on art and poetry in the city. In 2013 she put on the children’s play La maison dans la forêt at the Festival Noël au Théâtre. Sybille Cornet also writes fiction. Her most recent text, L’inconnu de Tirlement, was published in the journal Soldes Almanach.