IN PROCESS - FALL 2017

2017 - 2018 seems to be taking me to school! I was asked to serve in an adjunct role at NYU, mentoring the second year MFA student designers with their props and set dressing work.  I have also become adjunct faculty at Kean University in Union, New Jersey, where I designed Marisol in October and I will be teaching Scene Painting in the Spring semester.

I am also designing the world premiere of a new translation by Daniel Brunet of The Last Fire by German playwright Dea Loher. Daniel is also directing, and the piece is brutal, disarming and quite beautiful. It is an examination of community and responsibility, as eight loosely intertwined people in a town all grapple with the loss of a young man in a hit and run collision.

I am just starting work on another world premiere - Little Black Shadows by Kemp Powers, directed by May Adrales. It will open at South Coast Repertory in April 2018. It's also a haunting and amazing piece, about two white children on a Georgia plantation in the 1850's and the two black children charged with their care. 

IN PROCESS - CATF

As previously noted, I am returning to the Contemporary American Theater Festival.  I continue to be proud of my association with this amazing and improbable place.  CATF (in it's 26th season this year) was named one of the top 10 festivals in the WORLD to attend this summer by worldguide.eu.  I am designing 20th Century Blues by Susan Miller and The Wedding Gift by Chisa Hutchinson, both world premieres.  The two shows run in rep with each other, and there is a two show day in the weekly performance schedule that demands a one hour changeover between the two sets!  That requires a transition from a very realistically outfitted New York artist's loft to the multi-location interior of a palace sometime in the very, very distant future.  Here are some renderings of both shows.

IN PROCESS - SPRING!

It is working out to be a busy Spring around here.  I will be returning to Hope College in Holland, MI to guest design scenery for The Tempest. Immediately after that I head to Pittsburgh to the Pittsburgh Public Theatre, to do scenery for Venus in Fur. I will also be returning to the Contemporary American Theater Festival in June to design scenery for the world premieres of two great new plays - 20th Century Blues, by Susan Miller and The Wedding Gift, by Chisa Hutchinson. Both plays are challenging and interesting - and vastly different evenings of theater!  I will post some research and developmental work as I get further along.  In the meantime, we covered Fashion Week for E! Entertainment again, and I have been working with a new collaborator - Best Events, based in Los Angeles, on the Samsung Concert venue for the South by Southwest Festival in Austin.  

IN PROCESS - THE LIFE MODEL

Right now I am in the process of designing the set for an exciting new piece, THE LIFE MODEL. It has been developed and written by the actors and the director through a series of workshop intensives - and we will open the piece in January at On The Boards in Seattle.  The piece is a multi-faceted portrait of  the 2011 Cairo Revolution seen through the eyes of four friends living in Cairo at the time.  It is working all of our creative and collaborative muscles, as the piece is very much alive and changing daily - so the design has to remain fluid enough to both nurture and adapt to the process.  I have spent a lot of time looking at pictures of the days of the revolution as well as trying to get an inside glimpse at daily life in Cairo, and people's personal spaces. My collaborators on the piece are Pirronne Yousefzadeh (director/co-writer), Julia Sears (writer/associate director), Cecila Durbin (lighting design), Zeina Barakeh (video design), Deb Trout (costume design), Pavel Zustiak (choreographer) and the actors/writers are Jeffrey Fracé, Gisela Chipe, Maha Chehlaoui and Ahmad Maksoud. On this page are a smattering of my renderings of the show, and research photos, etc.  Please note that I don't own any of the research images. http://thelifemodelshow.com

The NEW website!

I have been hard at work re-vamping my entire web identity.  I wanted to get this up and running, but note that I will be adding some older work that I feel still represents me well...those pages will continue to trickle in, so stay tuned!