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.

SET & costume design CONCEPT

Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom by suzan-lori parks

This complex and poetic play investigates what it means to be an African-American, and the way language is used to impose hierarchies and power structures that define identity. Across four surreal vignettes spanning different spaces, times, and power dynamics, five individuals struggle to find the words to describe their experience.  

The question of who is entitled to space in the world reverberated deeply for me, and I found striking rhymes between the forms of confinement African-Americans have endured through history, from slave ship to housing project to prison cell. To craft this play's world, I drew upon these congruencies and took inspiration from the work of Luis Barragan and a wildly-colored and -corroded prison I visited in Avignon, France.

Designed for the Berliner Ensemble's theater space in Berlin, Germany.

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