Spotlight: Es Devlin
- kellyjo91
- Aug 25, 2025
- 4 min read
Today, I’d like to spotlight one of my favorite theater designers—Es Devlin. I learned about her in the same way I learn many things since I’ve started teaching—from a student.
One of the written assignments our students complete in Theatre Appreciation at Red Rocks Community College is a Spotlight Paper. They are welcome to choose any theater artist—an actor, designer, director, producer, musician, writer, dancer, composer—and highlight their career and what they have contributed to theater as an art form.
I enjoy reading these assignments, because every semester students come up with two or three artists who are new to me. I’m ashamed to say I no longer remember the name of the student who spotlighted Es Devlin many years ago, because I owe them a huge thank you. It was early in my teaching career, before I ever had a notion about writing a textbook. Now, I make sure to attach the names of students to the new artist connections they inspire.
Anyway, this student’s paper sent me down hours of rabbit holes to study Es Devlin’s unique creative work. Here is just a snippet of a spotlight I plan to include in the textbook I’m currently writing.
I’d like to start with her own words:
If you asked me to explain what is a creative life, it is a life expressed by constant curiosity and constant awareness of the fact that there is more to learn. And that actually to be of any service in society, the first thing you have to do is learn and keep learning and keep seeing things through the perspective of others.
The quote comes from a short YouTube interview from the Smithsonian Design Museum Cooper Hewitt. The interview is entitled A Creative Life with Es Devlin. It’s short—only about a minute and a half in length—but wow, it is a perfect encapsulation of someone who leads an intensely creative life.
Es Devlin was born in 1971 in London, and the way she describes her childhood in a TEDx Talk from 2012 reminds me of an only slightly less magical version of Harry Potter, sitting in a broom closet with her siblings imagining other worlds with the help of a 1970s Viewmaster.
She has a strong background in music but received her first college degree in English Literature. This came in handy throughout her career, and I enjoyed when in that same TEDx talk she compared studying rap lyrics to studying Shakespeare. Today’s most successful rap artists are geniuses with wordplay, and she recognized this before beginning to collaborate with Kanye West on a set design for his concert tour. She studied his lyrics as diligently as she would study a play or an opera.
Es (short for Esmeralda, by the way) went on to Central Sain Martins College of Art and Design to complete her Foundations course in Fine Art in 1995, followed by a more specialized Motley Theatre Design Course in 1996. It focused on design but also helped to synthesize her interests in writing, music, and art. She fell in love with creating worlds on stage during this intense period of study.
Here is where the mind-blowing stuff comes in. The best way to express her unique designs is to show you a few.
I’ll start with my favorite—a set design for Bizet’s Carmen at Bregenz Festival, Lake Constance, Austria. In the video link, Es Devlin described her creative process for coming up with this incredible stage design that would remain in Lake Constance for two years as an exhibit.
She has also created visual masterpieces in stadium concerts for superstars like Adele, Kanye West, Beyonce, and Lady Gaga.
Es Devlin has designed stage worlds for operas, plays, concerts, art installations and fashion shows, and her work continues to grow and cross boundaries. There are likely numerous reasons for her success in addition to obvious artistic talent. Two that emerge through every interview I’ve seen or read are her constant curiosity and her ability to collaborate. Es strongly dislikes the word “client” and prefers to consider everyone she works with “collaborators.” Her artistic collaborative designs become threads that connect humanity.
Here is another quote from the TEDx talk that describes how she sees this connection.
Humans evolved first to feel and then to be able to imagine the feeling of others. And because evolution isn’t an inventor but an adapter of existing faculties, those same chemical and electrical functions in your mind that take place when you feel your own pain and your own joy take place when you’re feeling the pain and the joy of others . . . So when you cry as you immerse yourself in the drama, your brain is going through precisely the same systems as when you cry at your own events in your own life. We have MRI scans; we have EEG scans that prove this to us. The Greeks didn’t, but they sensed it all the same . . . They knew the lessons that would be learned by a community coming together, not just thinking, but feeling, understanding a lesson at a level more profound than conscious thought at the level of empathy, catharsis, release of emotion together, and compassion. And I would say that the most evolved state that the human mind has attained is that of compassion, of understanding another’s pain and another’s joy.
In theater, our purpose is to promote all these things she talks about—compassion, understanding, empathy. The sign of an evolved society is one that values the arts because of the unique ways they connect us. Es Devlin is a leader in helping us evolve to imagine other worlds and different perspectives.
Gorgeous...thank you for introducing me to this brilliant artist.