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Matt Saunders

About this Artist

Matt Saunders is a scenic designer, and creator of new performance work based in Philadelphia. Matt is a founding member, and Associate Artistic Director of the OBIE Award-Winning, experimental theatre company, New Paradise Laboratories. Saunders has designed over 150 works of theater, opera, dance, and live performance. His work has been presented in Philadelphia at the Walnut St. Theatre, The Arden Theatre Company, Headlong Dance Theatre, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Philadelphia Theater Company, Theatre Exile, and the Wilma Theater. Nationally, Saunders has designed for Yale Repertory Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, The Guthrie, Mark Taper Forum, Soho Rep, Signature, The Public Theater, The Apollo, Lincoln Center Theater, The New York Philharmonic, Glimmerglass Festival, Spoleto Festival, and the Kennedy Center. Internationally, Matt’s design work has been seen in London at The Almeida Theatre, The Barbican and Hackney Empire. Additionally, Saunders designs for opera and theater have toured to Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Bruges, Bochum, Barcelona, and Malmö. Matt’s design work has been featured at the Prague Quadrennial, and in numerous design magazines and textbooks. He is the recent recipient of the Drama Desk Award for Best Set Design of a play for the Off-Broadway Production of the world premiere play Daddy by Jeremy O Harris. Matt is an F. Otto Haas Award Winner, a 2015 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, and a 2014 Pew Fellow. He holds an MFA in Design from the Yale School of Drama and is an Associate Professor of Design in the Department of Theater at Swarthmore College.www.mattsaunders.net