'Art' and 'technique', the two words that any designers must have thought about before... There would be no one that opposes to that art needs technique when designers and artists create works. Art is an act to plan something as one wishes in order to share a certain emotion expressed from a side of a human being with others. To produce emotion as the true form that one wishes, technique is an indispensible element. Artists are the scientists and philosophers who explore the life and spirit of mankind and also the essence of the world. Also, the one thing that is clear is that especially the group of people called as designers is the artists and technicians equipped with greater and more special skills than what general people have. The space created by scenic designers is the world that reflects the artist's philosophy to men and the world, emotion and affection, imagination, and more clearly the person's own skills. Therefore, it can be said that technique is the essential part among the various talents required by artists. No matter how excellent imagination an artist has, what could it be if the person hasn't acquired the technique to realize it? You may know that designers often had to abandon, defer, or modify their imagination due to the lack of technique. It doesn't mean that only with the technique, one can make something just to brag about it to others. But artists have to polish their technique to express their own emotion in order to create a more truthful form. Especially the designers should use technique to realize their emotion in reality and also gain people's sympathy. When technique lacks, artists will have to lose the trustfulness of their work when approaching to others with it. Designers are the people who have to create the most special and the most ordinary objects as they accept technique and are grounded on art.

A working designer is first and foremost a collaborator. The set design for a production is imperative on how collaboration begins, and the outcome of the design is an outcome of the success of that collaboration. In the world of theatrical production design, a successful collaboration is based on the communication skills of the designer, the image research and ability to go beyond the text, and of course, a deep knowledge of the show at hand. A successful design will then show that collaboration at it's finest - the established world that has been created to tell the story.

The set design for Hamlet, Directed by Michael Moran, in the UCSD Mandell-Weiss Theatre was a unique challenge and a collaboration process that started months before the show was open, and in the end yielded a successful and visually engulfing result. Set in a modern to almost futuristic tone, the world of Hamlet revolved around a few central ideas - For Hamlet, Elsinore is a prison and for the rest, it is where the evils of the world and the truths locked away behind a cold, clean facade. The Ghost enters the world to reveal the truth to Hamlet, and charges Hamlet with revealing that truth to others. The scenic design reflects Hamlet's journey in revealing the truth and exposing Elisnor for what it is. Standing at 16 and 24 feet, the walls of Elisnor shift and slide into different configurations every act and expand the set throughout the play. Every prop and detail of this design had to be carefully researched and thought out to fit into this stark and monumental design. Overall, the aesthetic was modern, sleek, and expensive, and the design was highly functional to allow for flexible staging.

Due to careful collaboration and a smattering of image research, the scenic design for Hamlet was not only visually cohesive, but it served the purpose of the play, established a world for the characters to live in, and helped fulfill the vision of the director.

Designers communicate time, place and mood with our work in any medium, but the unique element of scenic design for theatre is the relationship between live spectators and live bodies onstage. In Hookman, I placed the audience on one side of the theatre to reinforce a filmic relationship with the action; scenery served to hide and reveal actors to build suspense. In both Elizabeth I and Tonight We Improvise I interspersed the audience and the actors in a non-traditional way, allowing for interaction with a meta-theatrical style. In A Willow Grows Aslant, the audience was literally inside of the play, moving through the set, participating in the action. For A Doll House, on the other hand, I put the audience outside of the home of the characters, peering in at them in a voyeuristic fashion through a barrier of snow and ice.

Humans have an instinctive need to personalize, and a great capacity to effect major customization of the world around them. We change the planet to suit our needs and our homes become an extension of ourselves. Since theatre is the heightened mirror of real life, it stands to reason that this instinct to personalize and customize our surroundings would be magnified on the stage. As a scenic designer, I have been exploring human relations to space, and how our need to adapt objects to us has imprinted our inner selves onto inanimate objects, imbuing them with a sense of character in their own right.

For realistic plays like Hedda Gabler or June Moon, the implications of this are straightforward. Hedda needs her curtains and the songwriters of Tin Pan Alley need a piano. Hedda projected a sterile and foreboding environment while our affable musicians called for a certain amount of endearing clutter. These signifiers are less obvious in the more abstract and metaphoric plays. For A Man, His Wife, and His Hat the characters bled into their surroundings tho the point of merger, but the walls themselves revolted and became their own personality. I had to create character through paint and projections. The process I went through to find character in architecture was perfect preparation for The Dybbuk. By merging the visual signifiers of Judaism with the architectural cues related to spirituality, I created a space that simultaneously spoke of the Jewish people and welcomed the varying spiritual ideas of the audience.

My designs are always pushing towards life, towards having, or at least implying, a life of their own as derived from the lives of their inhabitants. Scenery can be people too.

There are days when I reach for the stars in hopes that if I don't quite

reach them at least I've landed on the moon. I spend more days getting to the

moon than ever reaching the stars, but someday I will. Call me a dreamer.

I like to imagine things that are outside of this reality and create worlds

that no one else ever thought could exist. I play pretend and pretend to play

reality. I like to put something in front of you that will make you think and then

take it away so all you have is a memory, hopefully a good one. I like to play a

make-believe that actually makes you believe. I am an artist and I am a

dreamer.

I began my work at UCSD with designs that were more complicated externally with as many wild elements as possible. I have learned how to take a wide range of ideas, and instead of spreading them thin across a broad swathe of elements I can now incorporate them into a rich yet narrow pallet of carefully tuned elements. With Joe Turner's Come and Gone, I had taken the needlessly complicated ideas that could have been externalized, and fed them into the details of my design. Certain critical concepts were contained within individual elements such as the texture of the floorboards, or the “hand carved“ patterns to echo traditional African art where a simple clean line would have sufficed.

With Space Between, directed by Alicia Peterson Baskel, my only design elements were white gallery walls, and the art that was displayed on them. Here, the positioning of drawings and videos was absolutely critical with mere inches making worlds of difference, and minor subtleties of wall texture speaking volumes about nature of the space. The twist was that after all of this precise work, these moving walls were released to the dancers to improvise with them however they wanted. Having calculated all of details so carefully afforded us the room for total improvisation with movement. The lesson I have drawn is that the more limited the elements, the more precise the fine tuning required, but the more universal their ability to connect, and the more likely an audience will read them properly.

Theatre exists as a moment between an actor and an audience member. A scenic designer knows that her work serves to heighten that moment, but still feels a temptation to view the scenic design as separate from the innately ephemeral aspects of theatre. While the a scenic designer is creating a tangible art installation, she cannot fully contribute to the creative process of the play without accepting that the design is as in flux as any other part of the production right up to opening night. The design is not a set of draftings, or a model, but what the audience experiences while they are watching the performance--this unique theatrical moment.

In "Little Children Dream of God" by Jeff Augustin, seventy-two feet of poly-silk fabric only really defined the eleven separate locations in the story once the actors walked over, around and through the undulating cloth. For "Drums in the Night" by Bertolt Brecht, a wall of satyrical billboards highlighted American love of buying things but only gained urgency when juxtaposed to the apathy shown to returning soldiers. In "A Lie of the Mind" by Sam Shepard, the dangling boxes of mementos that defined the walls were just a clutter of bric-a-brac until the faulty memories of the characters turned them into a physical representation of hopelessly disorganized recollection. The scenic design for "Mr. Burns" by Anne Washburn, was built of scavenged parts, which were merely whimsical until they were given the context of the characters struggling to rebuild a society.

Theater. ˈθēətər. Noun. A building or outdoor area in which plays and other dramatic performances are given. The area in which something happens. Theater.

Blackbox. Thrust. Proscenium. Thrust. Thrust. Thrust. Thrust. Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre. Arthur Wagner Theatre. Mandell Weiss Theatre. Mandell Weiss Forum. Mandell Weiss Forum. Mandell Weiss Forum. Mandell Weiss Forum. winterWORKS!. Bodies in the Park. Spring Awakening. Gas House Baby. The Santa Barbarians. In the Red and Brown Water. Titus Andronicus.

Every theatrical space is defined by its architectural boundaries and design, each presenting a different, yet specific set of restrictions and limitations. As a set designer, I see beyond these limitations and restrictions. I see the vast and endless possibilities of theatrical space and how the boundaries of architectural design can be

manipulated, transformed, and integrated to create numerous portals into worlds collaged together by reality and fantasy and then brought to life through precise execution and careful calibration.

Clever rigging. Manipulating seating. Pushing passed the proscenium. Angled paper plates. Cardboard cutouts. Semi-circular brick walls. Seventy foot turntable ramp. MFA 2013.

In my work as a scenographer I develop a visual and tactile landscape that frames a performance. I use "scenographer" rather than "designer" because my work includes more than a single area of focus, and emphasizes the dramaturgy of the physical world. I am most interested in live performance that prizes storytelling and includes the audience in the imaginative journey. I seek moments of theatricality that create space for a viewer to make an imaginative leap and understand images, objects, and spaces in unexpected ways. This transferred inspiration activates audiences, who make the connections themselves while watching the piece unfold.

Scenography creates visual parallels between a text or other source material and the vision of a director. This work is both generative and dramaturgical - it reaches beyond the most obvious metaphors to locate connections between medium and story, and interrogates assumptions made by those closest to the work by taking on the perspective of a viewer. By defining and supporting the rules of the performance space, scenography illuminates meanings that may not otherwise be evident. Once the core of the piece is located, my work shifts to the more practical modes of design and execution, prioritizing resources to communicate those critical ideas within the physical and budgetary constraints of each individual process. In this work, I am a craftsperson, one who must understand the material world and shape it for use by the performer and communication to the viewer.