Manoel Candeias began his career as an actor in 1993, having acted in Paulo Faria’s Um Certo Faroeste Caboclo, staging that gave rise to the company Pessoal do Faroeste; Marçal Aquino and Marília Toledo’s Amor de Servidão, directed by Marco Antônio Braz; Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, with Cia. de Ópera Seca, directed by Caetano Vilela, Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, directed by Sérgio Ferrara, among other productions premiered in São Paulo and touring other Brazilian cities. In 1999, Candeias debuted as a playwright and director with the play Juventude Transvirada, that was followed by stagings of his theatrical texts Te Encontro Lá Embaixo (2004), Volátil (2005) and Quase Anônimos (2008). In 2023, his play A Cidade do Urso was the winner of the Competition for Dramaturgy for Children and Youth, by the theatre company Teatro Art’Imagem, from Maia, Portugal.
Manoel Candeias also works in audiovisual, having beeing in soap operas such as Senhora do Destino (TV Globo), series such as O Negócio (HBO) and Escola de Gênios (Gloob), in addition to more than a hundred advertising films and corporate and educational videos.
Candeias has a degree in Social Communication and a Masters in Arts and a Doctorate in Performing Arts, both from the University of Campinas. During his doctoral research, selected from the FAPESP and CAPES funding programs, he carried out a period of research at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon, when he studied the comic theatrical work of Portuguese author Gervásio Lobato. In 2020-21, he carried out a post-doctoral research at the School of Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo (ECA-USP).
Since 2022, he has been living in Braga, Portugal, and continues to teach remotely in the undergraduate and master’s programs in Performing Arts at the Escola Superior de Artes Célia Helena, in São Paulo. In 2024, he was selected by the Culture Moves Europe mobility program, funded by the European Union and the Goethe-Institut, for a 2-month work period at Wiener Wortstätten, a dramaturgy center based in Vienna, with local and international projects. Candeias teaches theatre history, dramaturgy and acting to people of different ages and levels of training, from professionals to beginners.
Manoel Candeias 