design | stage
SBTD National Exhibition & Celebrating five decades of creativity across the UK, in partnership with
Exhibiting dates: Monday 15th February, 2027 to Sunday 7th March
Venue: Delia Derbyshire Building, Coventry
The Society of British Theatre Designers’ (SBTD) new national exhibition design | stage celebrates UK performance design made between 2023-27 and will take place in Coventry from 15 February – 7 March 2027. It will show the huge range of work made by approximately 150 UK professional set, costume, sound and lighting Designers, across theatre, musicals, opera, dance, community, theatre-in-education, events and spaces of all scales.
Applications are now closed.
Who do I contact for questions?
Dana Pinto – Curator exhibitions@sbtd.org.uk
Lexa Kirity – design | stage Administrator designstage@sbtd.org.uk
Looking to be an industry sponsor? Find out more info here
design | stage Team
Dana Pinto – Curator
Dana is interested in theatre that breaks the proscenium arch, drawn into performance that surrounds, invites and unfolds in immersive ways. With an arts lecturing experience in scenic construction / painting, she has led curriculum teams and authored national qualifications in Production Arts. She founded the School of Scenography and Design & Tech Innovations Ltd, served as UK Managing Editor for The Scenographer (2020–24), Vice Chair/Treasurer for Second Wave, and supports SBTD through mentoring, collaboration, and championing underrepresented voices.
Dr Xristina Penna – Making Unmaking Remaking Lead
Dr. Xristina Penna is a Performance Designer, Researcher and Educator. Her work bridges scenography and neuroscience to create spatial environments (scenographic contraptions) who shape perception, and embodied experience of the audience through mixed-media, handmade objects, and deliberately inefficient aesthetics. She is the Programme Leader for Production Arts: Props, Painting, and Set at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and co-convener for the Theatre and Performance Research Association Scenography Working Group.
Dr. Susannah Henry – Publications and Editorial Lead
Dr. Susannah Henry is a practice researcher in scenography and Programme Leader for the BA Performance Design at Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Susannah is interested in the relation of the designer’s story to their practice, which she frames as autoscenography. She makes performance and writes about topics relating to motherhood, scenography, intersectional feminism and ecology. Her freelance design practice is currently focused on work for younger audiences.
Lexa Kirity – Exhibition Administrator
Lexa was born in Romania and relocated to the UK in 2020. She is a Set and Costume Designer and maker with a particular interest in devised projects and education through theatre. With a strong background in performance and multidisciplinary practices, her work is informed by an exploration of emerging artistic approaches. In collaboration, her ‘what if’ approach to problem-solving is valued for deconstructing barriers and embracing challenges with joy and curiosity.
Miren Candina – Editor
With a background in translation and art studies, Miren is currently pursuing a PhD in Contemporary Arts at the University of the Basque Country. Interested in how images can shape both spatial environments and experiences, her research explores the intersections between live performance and image-recording practices through scenography and modes of display. She also engages in projects that combine her interests in language, writing, and image-based practices.
Jiahui Cai – Editor
Jiahui Cai is a multidisciplinary artist exploring storytelling through material and sensory experience. Working across theatre, food scenography, and ceramics, she creates mixed-media narratives that blur boundaries between performance and everyday objects. With a background in performance design, her practice engages space, texture, and transformation, using clay and food as vessels for memory, ritual, and cultural dialogue.
Stella-Jane Odoemelam – Film and Immersive Experience Lead for The Designer Lens, 50 Years of SBTD, and OnStage
Stella-Jane is a London-based theatre designer and practitioner working across performance design, including carnival, dance theatre, live events, and immersive experiences. Her emerging practice blends playful, graphic styles with architecturally inspired, revisionist narratives. She integrates sound, lighting, video, and VR to create richly immersive experiences in her work. Committed to sustainability and ethical practice, she also works as an educator and facilitator, delivering creative design workshops across educational and community settings.
Paul Burgess – Sustainability Co-Lead
Since training at Motley, Paul has worked as a Set, Costume and Video designer at venues ranging from Shakespeare’s Globe and Glasgow Citizens to theatres in Rawalpindi, Mumbai, Hanoi and New York. He has co-created installations for locations including the Barbican Centre and a former nuclear bunker in Siberia. An advocate for ecologically minded creative practices, he leads the SBTD’s Sustainable Design Working Group and is a co-director of Ecostage.
Kira Curtis – Sustainability Co-Lead
Kira is a Lancashire-based researcher, facilitator, and scenographer, currently undertaking a practice-as-research PhD at Lancaster University. Her research uses scenographic exploration as a method for imagining sustainable futures, particularly in Blackpool. Alongside this, she works on a range of nature and theatre projects and is a co-director of Ecostage, placing ecological thinking at the heart of creative practice.
Maelisa Singer – Accessibility and Inclusivity Lead
Maelisa is a Costume Designer, Visual Artist, Writer and Researcher. Her work concentrates on the intersection of costume and disability, with particular focus on invisible disability, stemming from her own lived experience. Maelisa is currently pursuing a PhD in Art at the University of Edinburgh, funded by the College Research Award.
Nicola Hewitt-George – Social Media Lead
Nicola is a Freelance Scenographer, Visiting Lecturer, and Design Technician for the Department of Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway University. Specialising in site-specific and applied and participatory theatre contexts, Nicola’s work has taken her to a variety of places; in theatres, on film sets, in royal palaces, underground in a subterranean warehouse, on the edge of a cliff, in museums, libraries, on the streets, and in the landscape.
Sophia Lovell Smith – Contributor
Sophia studied at Bretton Hall. She designs for theatre, opera, dance and interactive performance for children. Recent designs include intimate work for babies from 0-12months to enormous immersive shows with casts up to 100 people – Lula (Mustard Seeds Dance), The Tale of the Whale (Britten Sinfonia) and SALT (Lighthouse, Poole & Angel Exit). Sophia also loves working with actor musicians – London Rhymes, a band making music for toddlers.
Clémence Bérnard – Legacy Team Support
Lydia Hann
Marc Jennings – Graphics Designer
Christianna Mason
Valentina Miranda
Ruth Paton
Frank Peschier – Facilitator on Staging AI: The Scenography of Robota
Katie Scott
Emma Tompkins – Schools Lead
50 Years of SBTD Exhibition at The Belgrade Theatre
50 Years of SBTD Team:
Terry Brown, Kate Burnett, David Cockayne, Marion Davis, Bob Crowley, Pamela Howard, Richard Hudson, Sophie Jump, Martin Morley, Dana Pinto, Stephen Pyle, Peter Ruthven Hall, Fiona Watt, and Liz Wright.
Terry Brown
Terry Brown trained at Trained at Wimbledon School of Art 1966-1969.
First job as Arts Council Assistant Designer ( a long gone start for Designers whereby if you got selected you went to a regional theatre and the Arts Council paid three quarters of your salary for a year, the only stipulation being you had to be given a minimum of one main house show to design!) Terry was lucky the Head of Design and designed four shows in the year.
After that worked mostly in Regional/Repertory theatres as Resident then Freelance as the positions disappeared. Continued until the early 2000s apart from a few years in 80s when he worked as Art Director for the model animation company Cosgrove Hall working on the TV feature and series of Wind in the Willows amongst others. The last years Terry overlapped theatre work with event design, product launches, and parties etc.
Terry has been a member of SBTD since the very beginning and served as a Committee Member and Director for a number of years as well as being involved in the mounting of the four yearly exhibitions biog.
Fiona Watt
Fiona has been a member of SBTD since the 1990s and became actively involved with the organising committee in the early 2000s before stepping up to the role of Honorary Secretary and Chair from 2014 – 2021. During her tenure she organised a series of events and fora to engage with and build membership across the whole of the UK in response to the concerns and interests of our intergenerational membership.
This culminated in The Value of Design, a campaign in collaboration with Equity, the Association of Lighting Designers (now the ALPD) and Stage Directors UK (SDUK), launched with the first significant meeting of designers at the National Theatre in April 2017 since the founding of SBTD.
In 2019, she led the curatorial team for Staging Places: UK Design for Performance 2015 – 2019 which represented the UK at the Prague Quadrennial in June 2019 before taking up a nine-month residency at the V&A from July 2019 – March 2020 and touring briefly to the National Centre for Craft and Design before the second Covid lockdown. The exhibition was supported with an extensive Regional Hearts programme, building interconnected hubs across the country between venues, higher education institutions and freelance designers, and a website showcasing the work of all 150 designers taking part which is still openly accessible today www.stagingplaces.co.uk
Like Terry, Fiona benefitted from an Arts Council Design Bursary in the early stages of her career. She also acknowledges the immense support of the Royal Cout Young Peoples Theatre in realising her ambition to become a designer, and the Lord Sainsbury Charitable Trust whose financial support enabled her to complete her training on The Theatre Design Course (subsequently Motley).
She is UK Performance Design Commissioner for OISTAT (International Organisation of Scenographers, Theatre Architects and Technicians).
Martin Morley
Martin Morley studied at Wimbledon School of Art 1963-66 Dip AD (Theatre design).
Martin worked in both theatre and television before retiring in 2010. Between 1966 & 1984 he was a full time Theatre Designer. Theatres include: Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, Arts Council Design Assistant, 1966-68. Opera House, Harrogate, designer 1968; Liverpool Playhouse, Assistant Designer to John Page, then head of design 1969-72, and from 1972 to 1984 he was Resident Designer with Theatr Cymru. He turned freelance in 1984 and since then worked primarily in TV for various independent producers making programmes for S4C. Alongside TV work, he continued designing many productions for Theatr Gwynedd, Bangor. He designed the first and last productions there, which is ridiculous: a theatre building should last longer than part of one professional life.
Martin designed two productions for Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru: Hen Rebeland Cysgod y Cryman
He came out of retirement to design two shows for Alleni, a community group on Anglesey: Y Fordaith Fawr in 2014 and Plentyn y Byd in and 2015. For many years served on the SBTD committee.
Peter Ruthven Hall
Peter Ruthven Hall joined the SBTD in 1987 and has held many roles as Committee Member, Secretary and Treasurer until 2020. He first exhibited in 1987 and was co-organiser of three SBTD exhibitions with Kate Burnett in 1994, 1999 and 2003 including participation at PQ and subsequent touring exhibitions. He is now a Theatre Consultant with Charcoalblue specifying theatre spaces for the future.
