Lewis Center Past Fellows

Matt Saunders

Matt Saunders headshot

Photo by Ryan Collerd

About

Matt Saunders is a Barrymore Award Winning performer, scenic designer, and a creator of new performance work proudly based in Philadelphia. Matt is a co-founding member and Associate Artistic Director of the OBIE Award-winning New Paradise Laboratories (NPL). He has been involved in the creation of NPL’s devised work through both design and performance. This work has included Prom, a co-production with the Tony Award-Winning Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis, BATCH, at the 2007 Humana Festival for New American Plays at the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville, and Fatebook, which was selected for the United States’ professional pavilion at the Prague Quadrennial 2011. Outside of NPL, Matt has designed over ninety productions.

His off-Broadway work includes Good Person of Szechwan at the Public Theater, The Tempest for the Public Theater at the Delacaorte, and As You Like It for the Acting Company at The New Victory and Lincoln Center. Regionally, Matt has designed for such companies as The Guthrie Theater, Mark Taper Forum, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Huntington Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, Spoleto Festival USA, The Wilma Theater, Arden Theatre Company, Pig Iron Theatre Company, and The Philadelphia Theater Company. Saunders was a 2014 Pew Fellow, holds an MFA from Yale School of Drama, and is the Assistant Professor of Design in the Department of Theater at Swarthmore College. Saunders is taking his first sabbatical from teaching in 2015-16 for his year as a Hodder Fellow at Princeton, during which he will develop a design-based, devised performance work that he will write, design and direct.


Recently, Saunders' work can be seen in the production of Futurity:

Review in the New York TimesPreview in American Theatre