Fordham Theatre Key Art II
About
The Fordham University Theatre Program is highly regarded as one of the most outstanding BA theatre training programs in the country, with graduates such as Denzel Washington, Patricia Clarkson, and Betty Gilpin. After graduating Fordham, I had the distinct honor of being asked back to design the theatre programs’s season art. Previously, Fordham had relied on basic graphics that were specific to each play and not the season as a whole. I saw a huge opportunity to create a brand that could communicate the season’s over all theme and build a distinct design system for to utilize for the individual posters and other promotional assets.
One of the most challenging aspects of this yearly project is that the key art must be created before anyone is cast, before sets are designed, before costumers are sewn. The imagery had to be both neutral yet very specific to the script.
My Role
☁ Conceptualization
☁ Creative direction
❑ Graphic Design
✒ Illustration
What Does It Mean to be an American?
Fordham Theatre’s mainstage season asks, What Does It Mean to Be an American?. National acrimony was at an all-time high after the 2016 presidential election, and became even worse after white supremacists and neo-Nazis staged a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Fordham Theatre’s director Matthew Maguire wanted audience to walk away from the plays more willing than ever to talk with one another, pick up the mantle and engage with others who they might otherwise be tempted to shut out.
It was important for the seasonal poster to represent this question through its imagery, without previously know the theme, and become a conversation starter in its own right.
ANTIGONICK
By Anne Carson
Directed by Rebecca Martínez
What happens when a contemporary woman translates and adapts an ancient woman’s defiance of rigid state power? Anne Carson’s audacious rendering of Sophokles’ classic gives fresh meaning to the term iconoclastic.
ORLANDO
By Sarah Ruhl
Directed by Ashley Brooke Monroe
What happens when a young man in a seven-day trance is transformed into a woman? What happens when we explore the infinite distinctions of gender? How does a person who has traveled across centuries, and all the lands of gender, find home?
SATELLITES
By Diana Son
Directed by Sonoko Kawahara
What happens when Nina, a Korean American architect, married to Miles, an African American dot.com producer, moves with their baby into a Brooklyn neighborhood that’s resisting gentrification? What happens when parenthood, work, and culture clash in a melting pot that’s melting down?
MR. BURNS, a post-electric play
By Anne Washburn
Directed by Elizabeth Margid
What happens when a society must rebuild itself after an environmental disaster and social collapse? What happens over 75 years when surviving “tribes” inject meaning into their lives by recovering from memory the TV series that bound them together before the Fall? This musical tragi-comedy asks: When communities are under assault from the forces of darkness will their performances unite them?
