Zane Pihlstrom

Zane is a costume and set designer for theatre, opera and dance. Since 2007, he has been a close collaborator with international avant-garde theater and opera director Yana Ross.  Work with Ross includes scenery and costumes for a Eurydice at The Finish National Theater (Helsinki); scenery and costumes for Macbeth at the Volksbühne Am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz (Berlin); costumes for Bambiland (National Theater of Lithuania; Oskaras Korsunovas Theater) and scenery and costumes for Sleeping Beauty (Seoul Performing Arts Festival, South Korea).

Upcoming international work in 2013 includes The King Stag (dir. Dmitry Troyanovsky) The Shanghai Theater Academy; You, We, Us, All (dir. Andrew Ondrejcak) Hamburg, Antwerp; Our Class (dir. Yana Ross) with The National Theater of Lithuania.

In New York City Zane frequently collaborates with Beth Morrison Projects.  BMP’s focus is to develop new operas and music pieces with today’s emerging and established composers.  Zane has designed scenery and/or costumes for Sumeida’s Song (Here Arts Center); Song of the Uproar, and Binibon (The Kitchen Theater) and Kocho (Galapagos Art Space). 

Since 2008 Zane has been the resident designer for Company XIV, a Brooklyn based neo-baroque dance company. He continues to collaborate with visual director and choreographer Austin McCormick on his intensely physical productions that fuse opera, dance, burlesque, circus and fashion. These productions are inherently dark, sensual re-imagined versions of classic operas and fairy tales.  Zane has designed costumes and/or scenery for multiple productions with Mr. McCormick thus creating a decadent company aesthetic that is often intentionally visually self-referencing. In 2012, Zane and Austin won the Opera America Director/Designer Competition. Their fully designed proposal for John Adams’s A Flowering Tree was presented at Boston’s conference and will subsequently premier in New York City in 2014.

In New York Zane designed the costumes for the premier production of  Tarrell Alvin McCraneys’ The Brothers Size by (dir. Tea Alagic, The Public Theater) with subsequent tours to The Studio Theater (Washington, D.C.) and The Abbey (Dublin, Ireland).  He has also designed productions with Gotham Chamber Opera, Steppenwolf Theater and Yale Rep.

Awards: New York Innovative Theater Award (2011), Bessie Nomination (2012), Donald and Zorka Oenslager Travel Fellowship (2006), The Donald and Zorka Oenslager Award in Stage Design ’05 & ’06, and the 2004 Michael Merritt Scholarship Award in Stage Design.  Zane’s work was exhibited at the Prague Quadrennial in 2007.

Education: BFA, DePaul University.  MFA, Yale School of Drama.

When Zane was fourteen years old he created his first fully designed production in the barn of his parents lonely Oregon farm.  This production of The Phantom of the Opera had no audience or cast save a snow white pony he had dyed yellow, then blue, then pink and finally green.  He has not removed the emerald glasses since.