Matt Castellvi

Castellvi's trajectory from Chicago training to international performance followed the pattern of several Chicago-trained improvisers who built their careers across multiple comedy disciplines before finding institutional homes abroad. His path through Second City, iO, and ComedySportz gave him fluency in long-form, short-form, musical, and ensemble improv traditions simultaneously, a range that made him adaptable across the formats that European improv venues and festivals typically present.

The move to Boom Chicago in 2019 connected Castellvi to one of Europe's most internationally recognized improv institutions, a theater that has historically recruited performers with strong Chicago or New York training backgrounds and has consistently toured and exported its work across the continent. The 2020 premiere of SITCOM, his first written review for Boom Chicago, demonstrated his expansion into the sketch-writing and scripted-review format that has defined Boom Chicago's theatrical identity since its founding in 1993.

The festival circuit Castellvi worked before his Amsterdam move, from the Adelaide Fringe to the Oslo Improv Festival, represented a strategic investment in international visibility that many Chicago improvisers pursue as a path toward European performance opportunities. His Chicago Reader recognition as Best Stand-Up while still active in the Chicago improv community also illustrated the relatively permeable boundaries between stand-up and improv in that scene.

Castellvi's teaching draws on training across three of Chicago's major improv and comedy institutions: The Second City, iO Theater, and ComedySportz Theater, each of which represents a distinct tradition within the Chicago comedy ecosystem. The Second City's character-based ensemble approach, iO's long-form Group Mind orientation developed through the Harold, and ComedySportz's short-form competitive format give his pedagogy a cross-institutional breadth that allows him to engage with students approaching improv from multiple performance contexts and objectives.

His experience with The Musical Armando at iO, iO's long-form musical improv format, gives his teaching a musical dimension that distinguishes it from pedagogies focused on spoken word improv alone. Musical improv demands a particular kind of ensemble listening, the ability to receive and incorporate musical offers alongside verbal and physical ones, and his deep immersion in that format at iO has shaped a teaching approach that treats musical responsiveness as an integral rather than supplementary improv skill.

At Gorilla Tango Theater, where he coached in the Ensemble Improv Program, and through his work with Baby Wants Candy at Second City, he developed his skills as both an ensemble performer and a pedagogue, learning the specific challenges of teaching long-form musical improv to performers at various levels of skill and musical experience.

His parallel career as a stand-up comedian performing on national and international stages has given his improv teaching a cross-genre perspective, allowing him to articulate the similarities and distinctions between improvisational ensemble performance and the solo comedic form. This comparative awareness enriches his coaching by giving students insight into how the same core skills of authentic presence, clear point of view, and audience responsiveness apply differently across performance contexts.

Castellvi's career documents the internationalization of Chicago improv training, as performers who built their craft at Second City, iO, and related institutions have increasingly found sustained professional homes in European theater contexts. His work at Boom Chicago places him within that institution's ongoing effort to maintain a cast drawn from the North American improv mainstream while serving Amsterdam and touring audiences across Europe. The Musical Armando work at iO and the stand-up recognition from the Chicago Reader represent two different markers of his standing within Chicago's comedy community before his relocation. His corporate training work and teaching at Boom Chicago's academy extend the applied and educational dimensions of improv that both institutions have long treated as central to their institutional mission.