British contemporary artist and designer Es Devlin views an audience as a temporary society and invites public participation in communal choral works. Her canvas ranges from public sculptures and installations at the V&A, Serpentine, Somerset House and Imperial War Museum, and outside at Tate Modern, Trafalgar Square and the Lincoln Centre, to kinetic stage designs at the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre, Teatro alla Scala and the Metropolitan Opera, as well as Olympic Ceremonies, Super-Bowl half-time shows, and monumental illuminated stage sculptures for large scale stadium concerts. She made drawings of 250 endangered London species in support of the London Wildlife Trust, 50 portraits in support of UK for UNHCR (the United Nations High Commission for Refugees) and a pavilion at the United Nations Headquarters in New York drawing attention to the United Nations Global Goals, while her ‘Nevada Ark’ video installation highlighted Nevadian endangered species at U2’s inauguration of the Sphere, Las Vegas. She is the subject of a monographic book, An Atlas of Es Devlin, and a retrospective exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. Devlin was the first female designeinof the UK Pavilion at Expo 2020, creating a pavilion that used AI to generate a collective poem across its 20 metre diameter timber facade. She has been awarded the Eugene McDermott Award for the Arts at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) as well as The London Design Medal, three Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, an Ivor Novello Award and a CBE. She is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and the University of the Arts London, and Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre at the University of Oxford.
Ph. Victor Picon Cartier
