Alexandra Friedman

set & production design | costume design | fabrication

Alex Friedman creates environments for performance - on screen, on stage, and on the body. She is especially excited about new work and having an open collaborative process. Alex aims to engage diverse audiences, exploding their preconceived notions of what film and theatre can be, and is interested in media that embrace the tactile craft of design and the beauty of the handmade.

Born in St Petersburg, Russia, Alex is a native of New York City and an alumna of Brandeis University and CalArts. Her design work for theatre has been presented at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and throughout the SF Bay Area and LA.

Alex recently completed jobs as a set designer on a new series for Bix Pix and on Guillermo del Toro’s new stop-motion Pinocchio film, produced by Shadowmachine and Netflix. Her first feature as a set designer, LAIKA’s stop-motion Missing Link, won the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature in 2020. She is currently open to new opportunities.

CO-CONCEPTION & DESIGN

HOW do you reconcile the cost of your experience at CalArts?

How Do You Reconcile...? was a site-specific guerilla installation juxtaposing the mythology of the California Institute of the Arts's history and mission with the reality of its ever-growing tuition.

Within intimate spaces on campus, we conducted over 150 interviews with a mixture of BFA and MFA students across different arts disciplines, exploring their experiences with paying for their education, their decisions to pursue arts degrees, and what they imagine the future might hold. The interviews were then compiled and played through phone receivers installed along an exhibit about the founding of CalArts, which includes a receiver playing Walt Disney talking about his vision for the school.

Created in collaboration with Brian Carbine, Jesse Garrison, Narae Kim, Shannon Knox, Aubree Lynn, & Ting Zhang