Teaching Philosophy

I want students to leave with more than a polished project. They should understand how to research, communicate, revise, draft, present, and collaborate with clarity. Scenic design education works best when it prepares students for both artistic growth and the realities of professional practice.

My teaching is rooted in theatre, but it speaks to a much wider creative landscape: live performance, digital visualization, themed entertainment, and collaborative design work that moves fluidly between concept and execution. I care about helping students become articulate designers who can generate ideas, develop them rigorously, and adapt their process to different collaborators, technologies, and production contexts.

Students learn best when process becomes visible, repeatable, and flexible.

I teach scenic design as both an artistic discipline and a professional framework. Students need visual literacy, but they also need to understand drafting, communication, materials, and how design choices function inside an actual process. That foundation includes hand sketching, spatial thinking, historical and dramaturgical research, and digital workflow.

I want students to understand why a method exists before they decide how to use it. A model, a rendering, a ground plan, and a research board are not isolated deliverables. They are different forms of communication inside the same design argument.

Different students arrive with different strengths, anxieties, and ways of learning. My pedagogy has to meet that reality. I use collaborative projects, scaffolded assignments, visual examples, and direct feedback to help students build confidence without lowering the level of rigor.

Accessibility matters here too. I try to build courses that give students multiple ways into the work, whether that means tactile making, digital tools, iterative checkpoints, or supplemental material that helps them stay connected to the process.

A classroom should make room for discovery while still teaching students how to meet the demands of production.

Mentorship is where teaching becomes long-term. I want students to leave with a stronger sense of their own voice, but also with practical habits around communication, resilience, and self-advocacy. I care about studio culture as much as curriculum. The most meaningful learning often happens in the environment we create around the work.

I think of teaching as research in public. The classroom is where I test new tools, update workflows, and ask how emerging technologies actually change what students need to know. That includes AI, rendering platforms, and visualization tools, but always with a critical lens.

I want students to understand not just what a tool can produce, but how it affects authorship, taste, collaboration, and the larger design process. The goal is not to make students dependent on a specific workflow. The goal is to help them become designers who can think clearly through whatever workflow the room requires.