Select upcoming and recent performance design includes:

Your Healing is Killing Me - scenic and projection designs for Virginia Grise’s performance text with Cara Mía Theatre Co. at the Latino Cultural Center in Dallas, TX (September 2021, 2023)

Singing in the Rain - Creating the films and projections for the Weston County Playhouse production, Weston, VT (August 2023)

Closing Ceremonies - collaborative art and projection installation with Leslie Kerby in the medieval Chapel St. Catherine, Auvillar, France as part of the VCCA Artist Residency. (July 2023)

Starchild: The Ballad of Debbie Walker - projection design at Crossroads Theatre Company, New Brunswick, NJ (May 2023)

Día Y Noche - projection design. Labyrinth Theater Company, 59E59 (March 2023)

Die Walküre - designer for the online production film with Dramatic Voices Program and director Jennifer Williams, Berlin (November 2022)

Old Westbury Gardens: Shimmering Solstice - outdoor projection mapping Holiday show working with Lightswitch Design. (November 2021, 2022)

Grounded - projection design at Human Races Theatre Company, Dayton, OH (September 2022)

Houses of Zodiac - projection design for this multi-media evening length work composed by Paola Prestini at The Broad Museum, Los Angeles (May 2022)

Fidelio - scenic & projection design with Austin Opera at the Long Center (April 2022)

The Infinite Energy of Ada Lovelace - scenic & projection design for this immersive chamber opera + cabaret evening by New Camerata Opera (April 2022)

Macbeth & The Great Gatsby - projection design for Aquila Theatre Company’s touring productions (January 2022)

The Lehman Trilogy - working again with video designer Luke Halls to bring The Lehman Trilogy to Broadway (March 2020/cancelled, October 2021)

Outer Side - working with creator and countertenor Juecheng Chen (Ju-eh) to design the visuals and facial projection mapping for the full-length New Music piece “Outer Side.” This will be a filmed video and later developed into a live performances as social distancing measures lift. (December 2020)

VISION Series - designing the sets & projections for Prospect Theater Company’s series of 6 commissioned short musicals for film. (September-December 2020)

The Lady and the Dale - HBO Documentary Series - working with a team to create animations for an upcoming HBO documentary series. (released January 2021)

My Name is Lucy Barton - associate projection designer on this Broadway transfer to Manhattan Theatre Club with video designer Luke Halls (January 2020)

Jazz Singer - projection design for the new experimental theater piece dissecting the problematic history of the film The Jazz Singer and the issues of black and Jewish authorship and representation in mainstream American entertainment at Abrons Art Center (September 2019)

Love Heals All Wounds - projection designer on an international dance tour premiering at Royce Hall, UCLA through CAP UCLA. Choreographed and directed by “Movement Art Is” dancers Lil Buck & Jon Boogz’ with dramaturgy by Talvin Wilks and produced by Sozo Artists. Featured in the Netflix series MOVE. (May 2019)

Bio

Lianne is a video & scenic designer and inter-disciplinary artist working in theater, opera, music, dance, film, art installation, & experimental performance hybrids of all kinds. A “dramaturg” designer, she prides herself on her versatility of medium and form, keeping a nimble and sensitive approach to every project’s unique structure & challenges. Her performance work has been seen in New York at The Kitchen, BAM, NYTW, HERE, La Mama, 3LD, Ars Nova, National Sawdust, Roulette, The Joyce, Baruch, 59E59, Abrons Art Center among others and in venues around the country and internationally. She was a production designer on the short film Toru premiering at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Along with Anna Rabinowitz, Kristin Marting & Matt Marks, she is the co-creator and video designer on the music-theater piece Words on the Street premiering at Baruch in October 2018. She is also a co-creator along with Zoey Martinson & Jon Martin of Smoke & Mirrors Collaborative, theater artist Brina Stinehelfer, and interactive technology artist Xinyao Wang on #HashtagProject (workshops on Governor’s Island, NYC and at Delphi Theater, Berlin). Lianne has collaborated with and designed for many groundbreaking and seminal dance, movement, new music, & opera companies, as well as composers, music groups, & visual artists including Lil Buck & Jon Boogz’ Movement Art Is, Sozo Artists, Jane Comfort & Company, Blue Man Productions, Beth Morrison Projects, American Opera Projects, Prospect Theater Company, Invisible Anatomy, Joseph Keckler, Earl Maneein of Seven Suns, Robin Cox’s Hourglass, and composer John King. Her installation and video art has been exhibited in galleries in New York and New Jersey including The Actors’ Fund and BRIC. Her collaborators in the visual arts have included Leslie Kerby (Counterpointe/Brooklyn Ballet/BRIC and more), Natalia Margolis, Fariba Alam & Urban Matter Design Firm (Bare Branches – Shrine Empire Gallery, New Delhi). Selections of Lianne’s many associate design credits include The Lehman Trilogy on Broadway (Luke Halls designer), My Name is Lucy Barton on Broadway (Luke Halls designer), A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by Julie Taymor at Theatre For a New Audience(Sven Ortel designer), Universes’ Party People at The Public Theatre (Liesl Tommy dir./Sven Ortel designer) and Marvel Universe Live! with designer Bob Bonniol of MODE Studios. She was named a "Young Designer to Watch" by Live Design Magazine in 2015. Lianne teaches Video Design/Creative Technologies at The New School, is a member of Wingspace Design Collective, and proudly earned her MFA from CalArts.

NEWS: 

*DON’T STAY SAFE, PART OF PROSPECT THEATER’S VISION SERIES, IS NOMINATED FOR A 2021 DRAMA LEAGUE AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING DIGITAL THEATER

*THE LADY AND THE DALE PREMIERES ON HBO AND THE ANIMATION IS WELL REVIEWED IN MANY PUBLICATIONS INCLUDING THE NYTIMES.

*MOVE, A NEW DOCUMENTARY SERIES ON NETFLIX, PROFILES THE BEHIND-THE-SCENES CREATION OF LOVE HEALS ALL WOUNDS AND IT’S CREATORS LIL BUCK & JON BOOGZ OF M.A.I.

*PROSPECT THEATER’S VISION SERIES PREMIERES WITH 6 MUSICALS FOR FILM, THE BAND AT THE END OF THE WORLD, LADY LAWYER LOCKWOOD RIDES HER TRICYCLE, UNRAVELL’D, LADY APSARA, DON’T STAY SAFE, & BRAIN.STORM.

*THE HELLO GIRLS IS NOMINATED! 2019 DRAMA LEAGUE AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION OF A MUSICAL / 2019 DRAMA DESK AWARDS FOR OUTSTANDING MUSICAL, OUTSTANDING MUSIC, & OUTSTANDING LYRICS / 2019 OUTER CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS FOR OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL, OUTSTANDING BOOK OF A MUSICAL, OUTSTANDING NEW SCORE, OUTSTANDING DIRECTOR OF A MUSICAL

*JANE COMFORT AND COMPANY 40TH ANNIVERSARY RETROSPECTIVE WINS THE 2018 BESSIE AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING REVIVED WORK

*TORU PREMIERES AT THE 2017 SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL. HERE IS A LINK TO THE A24 TRAILER

*NAMED A 2014 YOUNG DESIGNER TO WATCH FROM LIVE DESIGN MAGAZINE

Artist Statement

I focus on new and experimental uses of video and sculpted spaces in performance. 

As a visual storyteller, I strive to integrate design and action and thrive on intense collaboration. Scenery needs to be more than just a backdrop setting time and place, and video in performance has so much potential to activate the theatrical reality in a completely new way.  I tend to make my first moves into a design through tactile points of entry by finding textures and materials that have emotional resonance, then carving out volume and finding metaphor.

Video in performance has widened the door for exploration of psychological arcs and character in addition to being able to manipulate our perceptions of time and space. The possibilities for video to defy expectations and radically alter point of view are exciting and still very new. I am interested in exploring video as character, as a physical being in the room, in active dialogue with the set, costumes, lights and especially the performers. Exploring alternative projection surfaces or emissive sources. Opening up the live environment with the toolkit of expressive cinematic techniques. How does a digital image live in the space; what relationship does it have to the characters; how is it a character itself?

I don’t think twice about the validity of creating a performance at the bottom of a well or on a freeway overpass or in a mountain stream. Performance can happen anywhere. The important thing is to create work, tell stories and respect the truth of what objects communicate while existing in the space activated in front of you.

A note on video in performance:

I am both a scenic and video designer and because of this, I am very interested in integration between the two. My video design work tends to take on a haptic, tactile quality and I spend a lot of time considering how and where content lives onstage. I love experimenting with different projection surfaces — a falling wall of sand, white paint smeared on a mirror, a human or puppet face — and alternate emissive devices — an ipad or an old, broken TV. When it comes to content creation, I’m drawn to the physical world. I tend to start by filming — exploring textures, light & characters so that they can live onstage in a different scale and manifestation. I also like exploring the system, the means of delivering content onstage, as a theatrical device, scenically and conceptually. Is there live feed — are we aware of the cameras? Are the projectors fully visible as objects onstage? Is the audience aware of how content is collected, processed & delivered onstage — and what does that mean in the context of the story?

The challenge in bringing video to the stage is in finding the visual and structural language of the video content and it's delivery system so that it brings new depths of meaning to the performance text that did not exist prior to video in the space. What do we see too much of: a rectangular screen behind the action with rear projections of scenic drops or other illustrative elements, in essence, a superfluous layer thrown on top of the spectacle. That kind of strictly scenic use of video imagery is only a tiny example of the possibilities of media in a storytelling format. And, at the end of the day, it is about storytelling. Video in performance is most exciting when it takes on a character of it’s own. Video should tap into a psychological arc of the story. It can be an enhancement of our protagonists' experience or act as a counterpoint to it. Physically, it can radically alter point of view and our perceptions of time, space, scale & physics. And it has the entire expressive world of cinema to pull from - closeups, cut rhythms, point of view shifts. At the end of the day, a video design should be so integrated within the event that to take it out would be a major degradation of the experience.