About
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. Mr Saunders has been involved in the creation of NPL’s devised work through both scenic design and performance for over 25 years. Outside of NPL, 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, The Goodman, The Alliance, Woolly Mammoth, LA Philharmonic, Glimmerglass Festival, Spoleto Festival and the Kennedy Center. In NYC, Mr. Saunders has designed productions for Soho Rep, Signature, The Apollo, Lincoln Center, The New York Philharmonic, Second Stage, MCC, The Foundry and the Public Theater. 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. Saunders’ design work has been featured at the Prague Quadrennial, and in numerous design magazines and textbooks. He is the recipient of a 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 and an Audelco Award for Excellence in Black theater for his design on FLEX a world premiere at Lincoln Center. Matt is an F. Otto Haas Award Winner, a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, and a 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, where he has been on faculty for 14 years.
