Sara Brown is a set designer for theater, opera, and dance whose artistic practice focuses on creating designs that invite audiences and performers into a shared act of imagination. Her work is rooted in interdisciplinary collaboration, and ranges from immersive performance installations to evocative stage landscapes. Her set designs have appeared at theaters around the country including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Boston Lyric Opera, The Huntington Theater Company, The American Repertory Theater, The Minnesota Opera, Hartford stage, The ICA Boston, and La Mama Experimental Theater Club. Her work also includes the design of an immersive environment forThe Other Shore (2021), a VR dance performance developed at Mass Moca and Jacob’s Pillow and the production design for the inaugural filmed production of the Pulitzer Prize winning play Fat Ham (2021) produced by the Wilma Theater.
Her recent research interests include reshaping engrained structures of performance development to allow for a more collaborative and humane process of creation. In her co-created piece Circlusion, she is working with choreographer Lilach Orenstein to build an insulated world where a dance performance reimagines the adaptive responses women have employed to navigate male-dominated images of pleasure, sex, power, and beauty not as a submission but as an elegant evolutionary strategy. Deconstructed Kama Sutra’s sex positions are woven with self-defense elements to create the movement score. The piece is an artistic answer to the many ways that sex is used as a tool of oppression and violence, including the weaponization of rape in conflicts throughout the world. The movement evokes pleasure, frustration, burden, care, violence, and power.
At MIT, Brown is an Associate Professor in Music and Theater Arts, where she has taught since 2008. Her teaching includes core design classes such as Fundamentals of Design for the Theater, Set Design, and Drawing for Designers, as well as specialized offerings in scenic painting and performance based interventions that blur line between art and life. She has connected MIT students with creative opportunities through residencies in New York, Peru, and Norway. She has also facilitated exchanges between MIT students and other local communities such as the collaborative mural project at the Suffolk County House of Correction in 2019. In the classroom, she emphasizes creative problem-solving and the translation of ideas into visual form.
Brown currently serves at the Associate Head for Music and Theater and she contributes to arts activities across the Institute. During the Artfinity Festival in 2024, she worked with students to develop the Funeral for Tiny Griefs at the MIT Chapel. She was also the co- faculty curator for the 2024 McDermott residency of Es Devlin. For this residency she worked with colleagues and students around the institute to realize Devlin’s project MIT Face to Face - a collective portrait of MIT. Through both her creative work at MIT and beyond, Brown seeks to build supportive structures for artistic engagement, and creative innovation. She relates her work of world-building on stage and in the classroom as a means of cultivating empathy, imagination, and resilience.