“what do you want to make?”
A student asked us whether there were any famous women set designers. This question turned into a conversation that has now turned into this book.
I co-authored Scene Shift: US Set Designers in Conversation with set designer and friend, Sibyl Wickersheimer. We brought together 30 emerging to award-winning set designers from across the country, meeting weekly on Zoom during the pandemic, to talk about our careers, our juggling act, and the state of theatre as the landscape shifted and unfolded before us.
Since recording those conversations into the book, Scene Shift has been reviewed in American Theatre magazine, selected and promoted as a non-competing publication at Prague Quadrennial 2023, featured on podcasts, and invited to the LA Times Festival of Books. We’ve continued Scene Shift Conversations at 10 different roundtable events talking with over 50 different people in and out of the theatre world. And we’ve curated an art exhibition around the book called Scene Shift: The Exhibit at the University of Southern California Fisher Museum.
We also have a 4.8 star rating on Amazon, whatever that means. ;)
“GET THIS BOOK. Designers and anyone who gives a shit about how the best of American theater is made—full of conversation, GORGEOUS pictures, and most of my heroes.”
— David Zinn, Tony Award Winning Designer
“Wickersheimer and Weiss sent out survey questions to [30] designers, then held a series of conversations between June 2020 and January 2021, when most theatres were shut down to prevent the spread of Covid and artists were grappling both with how to pay their bills and how (or whether) to return to an industry built on the backs of undervalued laborers.… Neither the work nor the conversations documented by Scene Shift’s designer cohort are over; Wickersheimer and Weiss invite readers to contribute their own stories via the book’s website, possibly for a future edition.”
— Amelia Merr, American Theatre: The Backstage Issue, Fall 2024
“finding new spaces”
Sibyl and I co-curated Scene Shift: The Exhibit around the book in 2024 at the USC Fisher Museum. We had no choice to be in constant conversation with each other, the museum staff, and the designers as we navigated somewhat uncharted territory.
Is set design art?
Can these objects be seen as fine art when they usually get thrown away after a show ends? What determines the value of an object? Can we encourage the audience to play with the art we made instead of just looking at it?
This exhibit was a way of honoring our craft of set design.
my featured work, Home Seige Home.
(To think that all of the nails and papers and sticks were counted by museum staff to be insured…)
We had a packed opening night. And during the 2 month run, we had curator walkthroughs with Sibyl and me; performances by Claire Mckeown and Shing Yin Khor’s The Gentle Oraclebird; a Blur Horizon processional with Abigail DeVille, artist talks with Deb O, Yuri Okahana-Benson, Abigail DeVille, and Sibyl Wickersheimer; a Worldbuilding Workshop with Shing Yin Khor; and a Choreography and Design Collaboration with New York choreographer D. Chase Angier and me.
“As set designers, we are asked to create spaces within other spaces... All the while we know that the structure we build will only exist for a short period of time. It is not permanent, just a brief foray into a world that exists for one story to be told…”
— Scene Shift: The Exhibit, Curator Statement Excerpt
LA Times festival of books
I participated in the LA Times Festival of Books roundtable with Rena H. Heinrich, Snehal Desai, Sharon Marie Carnicke moderated by Luis Alfaro called “Setting the Scene for Change: The Future of Theatre.” It was also turned into a podcast episode by Ideas in Action, USC’s Podcast Series. Listen here.
“Design is just language and the real issue is what you use that language to do.”
— Tibor Kalman
prague quadrennial
At the Women in Set Design Roundtable on the PQ Talks Stage, I talked with 5 designers (Sibyl Wickersheimer, Lucia Škandíková, Eva Jiřikovská, Elahe Marjovi, & Markéta Fantová) about our approaches, creative processes, and real experiences in set design.
Scene Shift: US Set Design in Conversation was selected and promoted as a non-competing publication.
“There’s just something about me that’s interested in not having a hierarchy to it at all. When we put preferential treatment on actual language and the playwright, or the play, what we are beholden to is written language. If we were to change that up, how could it change theatre?”
— Maureen Weiss, page 214 in Scene Shift
it’s a conversation
As designers, we rarely get to talk to each other about the very thing we do because there is usually only one set designer per show... Sometimes we feel as if we work in a vacuum. There’s a hunger for conversation between each other. We also wanted to highlight designers of color, women, and non-binary voices and their work, something that wasn’t done in the textbooks our students are told to use.
In our conversations, we realized that set designers thrive in this continuum of hunting, digging, and investigating. We answer questions with questions. We are “working” all the time. There was an instant joy in discovering this commonality and sharing our practice and experiences with one another.
We’ve continued the conversation that Scene Shift inspired all over the US and internationally. We often extend the conversation to collaborators, like directors and playwrights, such as the roundtable at Skylight Theatre with Director Jessica Hanna (pictured below).
We launched Scene Shift at Alfred University in New York, the CTG Annex in Los Angeles, and Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago (pictured second), of course with conversations and some very special guests, like renowned set designer Anna Fleischle (pictured first).
“Something that we’ve spoken about for the past few months, the economic sustainability of the career of a scene designer, can it be something that actually sustains us monetarily? Is it a job?”
— Maureen weiss, page 250 in Scene Shift
where to buy Scene Shift
New York, NY - The Drama book shop
Los Angeles, CA - small world books
Chicago, IL - the understudy
Anywhere - amazon
Direct - Routledge
Interested in carrying Scene Shift at your store or event? Looking to have a Scene Shift Conversation?
“Will the present state of things become past before our very eyes?
Will our occupation continue to exist?
Was it ever an occupation?
Are we just a stack of ideas that become things that then become other things until they are destroyed and become waste?
Are we in a conversation still and has the conversation shifted?”
— Scene Shift: The Exhibit, Curator Statement Excerpt