Laertis Vasiliou

Laertis Vasiliou — Biography

Laertis Vasiliou (Albanian: Laert Vasili) is an actor, theatre director, writer and translator who works between the stages of Greece and Albania. Through plays about immigration and being a foreigner, he became the first to use Albanian artists living in Greece in professional productions, and he is one of the prominent civil-society voices on the rights of Albanians in Greece. In December 2024 he entered Big Brother VIP Albania 4 and finished third in the final.

His father is Albanian and his mother Greek; both were officers in the Albanian military, so his childhood moved between Tirana, Sarandë and Delvinë. He entered the Academy of Arts in Tirana in 1993, moved to Greece in 1994 and was admitted to the National Theatre of Greece Drama School, placing second among 750 applicants, and graduated in 1997. In 2001 he was nominated for the Dimitris Horn Prize as best young actor. The plays he directed between 2003 and 2015 ran for more than 400 performances in Greece, Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania; they include Electra, Kadare's Doruntine and Agamemnon Inferno, Mrożek's The Emigrants and McNally's Corpus Christi. He has also translated plays from English into Greek and Albanian, and from Greek into Albanian.

On screen he appeared in Sti skia tou polemou (1999), Hostage (2005) and The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea (2019); he came second on Dance with Me in 2014 and won Blind Taste in 2015. His honours include best director of the year at the Pegasi International Awards in 2015 and best director at the Prespa theatre festival in 2021..