Biography

My love for collaboration, storytelling and shared experiences drives my passion to work creatively as does the power of performance for change. I trained in Theatre Design at Nottingham Trent University, followed by an MA in Applied and Participatory Theatre at Royal Holloway University where I received the Katharine Worth Award for outstanding achievement across the postgraduate program. I work as a freelance designer and maker, and I am a visiting lecturer in scenography and the design technician for the Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance at Royal Holloway University. I specialise in site specific spaces and have a keen interest in working scenographically and devising work within applied and participatory theatre contexts. I have worked across a variety of places; on set with Marvel, down the haunted corridors of Hampton Court and The Tower of London, underground in a subterranean warehouse below the streets of London, on the cliff edges of Portland at dusk, in museums, and on stage with human rights theatre company ice&fire bringing true stories to life.

A collaborative performance project celebrating theatre and theatricality in the women’s suffrage movement with director Rebecca McCutcheon, dramaturg and producer David Bullen and actors from the Department of Drama at Royal Holloway University. Working from archival research into the lives of 6 diverse suffragists and suffragettes, we staged a protest march on the centenary of the Representation of the People Act, the first law to give women the vote in the UK, which was featured in news publications such as the Guardian, the BBC, and the Washington Post. Performances around Royal Holloway University also took place on International Women’s Day, and as part the college’s Play! Festival and Festival of History.

The first site specific staging of Caryl Churchill’s Far Away in the cavernous subterranean space of Ambika P3 which sits underneath Marylebone Rd in the middle of London.

‘The designs, by Nicola Hewitt-George, treat these spaces like a series of installations.’  Plays International

I designed, constructed and installed eight separate installations across Hampton Court and The Tower of London for their annual Halloween Trail.

True stories of crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, China. This staging was the result of a two week R&D for a new script telling the stories of Uyghur, Kazakh and other Turkic Muslims living in Xinjiang, China. We used live feeds and scale models to tell these accounts of detention centers, surveillance, and torture. Striped backed visuals served the powerful script, and moments of hope were found in lullaby’s sung in front of a video of a model of the detention centers which upon the sun setting, morphed into the light of a flickering candle.

‘The intrusive surveillance endured by people inside and outside the camps was brilliantly captured by the stage designer, Nicola Hewitt-George, through the use of
projection and models.’ Theatre review by Aziz Isa Elkun and Rachel Harris.