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.

POMEGRANATE JAM: A SHADOW BALLET | 2014

"This story unfolds through an elegant mixture of shadow puppetry and dance, all silhouetted on the same screen, merging seamlessly into a single, poetically formed world. The puppetry is minimalist yet charming, establishing the play's vistas of colour, while the Balinese-influenced dancers are astonishingly graceful, emotive and dreamlike."

-Sean Bell, Fest Mag

Invasion! | 2012

"Iranian-born visual artist Ali Dadgar and set designer Alexandra Friedman created a visually captivating set of wall-to-wall newspapers and graffiti that completely envelope the audience sitting in the theater's 50-seat box car, lending an intimacy and immediacy to the performance. The effect is a gritty, urban atmosphere, lending itself perfectly to the play's hip-hop-like semantic rhythms."

-Farah Bullara, Aslan Media

Crevice | 2012

"The staging is superb and uses every inch of the challenging La Val's tiny stage... The set design by Alex Friedman with wallpaper and wainscoting and orange carpet immediately and convincingly takes you into the single-parent apartment of mom with talented and smart 20-somethings still living at home."

-John A McMullen, Berkeley Daily Planet

Crevice | 2012

“In short, it's got all the ingredients of a lighthearted situation comedy. And it even subscribes to that form, with short dialogues that almost always end on a punch line, breezy music played between scenes, and a set that recalls nearly every TV home environment of the Seventies and Eighties (brown rug, family photographs, Scrabble pieces scattered on the coffee table — all artfully designed by Alex Friedman).”

-Rachel Swan, East Bay Express

Jukebox Stories | 2013

"Round three [of Jukebox Stories] has the subtitle 'The Secrets of Forking' and is loosely themed around fortune telling. Alexandra Friedman's surprisingly elaborate set is full of mystical and Oriental kitsch: red-clothed tables, candles, kitty statues, a palmistry poster, and origami birds all over the floor."

-Sam Hurwitt, KQED

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