Storyboards by more than 50 famed filmmakers and animators including Martin Scorsese, Hayao Miyazaki, Federico Fellini, Steven Spielberg, Wes Anderson, and Alfred Hitchcock are set to go on display in an exhibition organised by Italy’s Prada Foundation.
The show, titled “A Kind of Language: Storyboards and Other Renderings for Cinema,” will kick off Jan. 30 in Milan at the Prada Foundation’s Osservatorio outpost and then travel to Prada’s Rong Zhai space dedicated to cultural activities in Shanghai in Nov. 2025.
Prada Foundation “Storyboards” exhibit – which comprises more than eight hundred mood boards, drawings, sketches and other items created between the late 1920s and 2024 – is curated by U.S. academic Melissa Harris, who is editor-at-large of Aperture Foundation. The show is designed to create an immersive experience by mimicking the working environment of a storyboard artist with drafting tables and an open layout.
“For many, storyboarding is an integral part of the process: visually setting a scene and then plotting out its ebbs and flows may help the film team consider relationships between characters, figure out how to advance the narrative, or realize how to convey the essence of a particular segment,” Harris said in a statement. “It may also help to troubleshoot, say when something does not seem quite convincing in a character or a physical interaction, or even provide visual references for the actors,” she added.
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Other cinema masters whose storyboards are featured in the show, besides the above mentioned greats, include Pedro Almodóvar, Ingmar Bergman, Bernardo Bertolucci, Luis Buñuel, Charlie Chaplin, Sofia Coppola, Cecil B. de Mille, Jonathan Demme, Terry Gilliam, Jean-Luc Godard, Renny Harlin, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Agnès Varda, Wim Wenders, and Akira Kurosawa.
Prada has long had close ties with the movie world. For several years in tandem with the Venice fest’s independently-run Venice section they have been producing “The Miu Miu Women’s Tales” series of short films by women directors. But the fashion house has also been stepping up cinematic activity through the foundation, an arts center set up in 2015 in an old distillery converted by star architect Rem Koolhaas which has a bar, known as Bar Luce, designed by Wes Anderson.