Scenic Design

DESG-GT.1054-1055   Lecture   4 Credits

Instructor(s): Nishikawa

Open only to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film.

The goal of Set Design 1 is to equip you with the tools needed to develop your own creative design process that will serve you through the next three years, and your lifetime as a professional set designer.

Emphasis will be placed on primary research that encompasses the cultural and historical background taken from the text, your emotional responses, as well as a healthy feedback loop between the 1⁄2” scale physical model and drafting.

What will be asked of you is challenging. The intention is that you will embrace the challenges and become comfortable with the art of exploration and making mistakes. You will be asked to make what you still do not know, and to trust the process. The resulting design will hopefully be what you could have not anticipated at the beginning of each project. 

DESG-GT.2006   Lecture  3 Credits

Open only to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film.

The Set Studio 1 class will be in close conversation with your Set Design 1 class. Primarily, the goal is to support your design work and be a resource for any technical skills that are needed to achieve your design. Secondarily, the course is designed to further your understanding of specific skills to help with your design process. We will be focusing on various skills which will help execute a successful ½” scale physical model as well as the continued dialogue between drafting (hand and digital) and the model. If things come up in your design class that demand extra attention or warrant more exploration, either individually or with the entire group, this class is a forum for these needs. We can and will adjust the syllabus accordingly throughout the semester to meet the specific needs, demands, and strengths of your cohort.

DESG-GT.1004-1005   Lecture   3 Credits

Instructor(s): Muller

Open only to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film.

A drawing class focused on creating, capturing, and meditating on space, spatial relations, and form revealed by light. Traditional and digital drawing media will be used to explore form and space - specifically theatrical and cinematic ways of looking will be explored.

DESG-GT 2000   Lecture   3 Credits

Instructor(s): Townsend, Helfrich

Open only to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film.

Through creation of devised work students will examine the structure of performance and the relationship with design. Additional focus will be on critique styles and ways to engage new works.

DESG-GT 1022-1023   Lecture   3 Credits

Instructor(s): Muller

Open only to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film.

A weekly 3-hour class taking curated deep dives into aspects of world culture, especially in the intersections of influence, change, and design. The course will mix lectures, analysis of images, research projects, discussion, field trips, guest speakers, and student presentations. Attention will be paid to how we know what we know and how knowledge is discovered, hidden, lost, reused, misused, and reinterpreted.

DESG-GT.1012-1013   Studio   2 Credits

Instructor(s): Allaire

Open only to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film.

As designers at NYU, you will learn much about collaborating with many different people and specialties in the process of designing produced work. This includes the subject of this class, your work with production artisans who will build, prop, paint, and otherwise execute the designs you and your creative team create. Stagecraft I will focus on this production process and how designers interact with their technical staff. There will be a heavy focus on the budgeting and technical design processes because that is the phase where designers and production staff have a meaningful interaction and when iteration of design ideas can happen with intention and support. This course will elaborate on the scenery, paints, and props production processes with a focus on how designers can successfully work alongside their production teams in the creation of theater pieces at NYU and beyond.

Lecture   2 Credits

Open only to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film.

The class combines first-year design students of all disciplines, along with dance students, and musical composition students into creative teams- to create original works of dance, music and design. The teams create a dance piece from the ground up, as advisors evaluate concepts and assist them to move the pieces into production, culminating in executing the scenic, costumes, and lighting designs and technical execution of all the elements as the choreographers, dancers and musicians assemble and refine the performance aspects.

DESG-GT 1006   Studio   3 Credits

Instructor(s): Banakis

Open only to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film.

The goal of CAD Drawing and Visualization is for students to become familiar with the principles of Computer- Aided Drafting as it applies to design for theater, film, and television, using the software Vectorworks. This course will focus on developing your abilities to use this software to create design drawings, to aid in the development of designs and models, to create technical schematics, to interface with other software, and to publish and print a package of drafting for a theater or film/TV set. This course will be focused on two major goals. One goal is to familiarize your understanding of the Vectorworks software, its tools, and its environment. The second goal is focused on your understanding of drafting for theater, film and television, and projects will be aimed at holistically developing your abilities to generate a complete package of drafting to communicate your designs to a production manager, your collaborators, or a builder. Class time will be devoted to examining techniques to utilize the CAD software and to looking at specific examples, while the homework assignments will be a chance for students to practice applying what you have learned in class. We will devote the last portion of every class to beginning the homework assignments together and spend some amount of each subsequent class looking at the previous week’s homework, especially if there were difficulties that need addressing and/or synthesizing.

DESG-GT 1100-1101   Lecture   4 Credits

Instructor(s): Steinberg

Open only to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film.

This is the first semester of a two semester course. Students will do primary research which is meant to be the foundation of their designs. Emphasis will be placed on the cultural and historical meaning of everything in the material world and how Theatre Design is meant to mine this information to communicate ideas about text and music. The course builds on the skills and techniques learned in Set Design I. Participation in class depends upon drawing, drafting and model making skills primarily learned in Set Studio and other auxiliary classes. While the development of these skills are always part of the discussion in design class and specific problems are addressed in individual critiques by the teacher and the group, it is assumed that students begin the class with the ability to communicate their ideas clearly. That being said, Set Design II is supported by Set Studio II which deals specifically with skills issues that arise in Design class with emphasis on model building, drafting and photographing models.

DESG-GT 1100-1102   Lecture   3 Credits

Instructor(s): Jung

Open only to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film.

The main purpose of this course is supporting students’ design process for the projects in Set Design II course. We will explore creative ways to use tools and materials, and investigate and practice high-level skills that should be acquired by set designers in their design process; such as building firm structures and textural surfaces, and 3 dimensional details for model making, lighting methods for model photography, and organizing drawing packets. We will also focus on looking at models as representation of realized full scale sets, to figure out the construction and technical matters that could occur in the real productions.

DESG-GT 1120-1121   Lecture   2 Credits

Open only to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film.

Second-year design students work as designers and assistant designers on realized productions in collaboration with the Graduate Acting Program. Faculty serve as advisors and productions are supported by professionally staffed shops.

DESG-GT 1030   Lecture   3 Credits

Open only to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film.

The goal of Intro to Art Department is to develop further your computer-based design skills with a focus on surveying, drafting for film, set replication, construction drawings, 3D drafting, and digital rendering. This semester, we will try to simulate the tasks and deliverables that you will be required to know in order to successfully work in an art department in film. The most common thing you are asked to do as first-time Assistant Art Director is to survey a location, take extensive notes and photographs, bring those notes back to the office, draft that space in 2D (and often in 3D), draft any set builds or set extensions for that space, produce construction drawings for that set, 3D model that set, and render that set for presentation or photoshop a version of that set into a location photograph. Film work is fast, detailed, and multitudinous. You are expected to be able to understand a space quickly, both in its larger characteristics and in its details, and to use that information to develop designs and represent those designs quickly, clearly, and thoroughly.Each project in your career will require you to inquire, learn, and develop a curiosity about the world around you. Sensory memory causes a strong connection in the brain, and studies have shown that relying on devices like computers and cell phones can actually reduce our ability to remember details and process information for ourselves. The Found Surface Paint Elevation project will ask you to find real world textures to reference and interpret for an artistic team. We will also discuss extrapolating visual research to understand construction and material.

DESG-GT 1140   Lecture   2 Credits

Open only to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film and in the Graduate Film Department.

This course is focused on manifesting the design and space of a play on stage, answering the question what makes the play come to life. Uniting directors and designers we seek to find what in the play unites performance and design. We will discuss the nature of collaboration as we examine the efforts of the assigned group collaborations and shared progress.

DESG-GT 1222   Lecture   2 Credits

Instructor(s): Segal

Open only to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film.

The course is designed to give you more authority in translating a narrative script into techniques that result in a coherent style. The class is structured according to the basic techniques of moviemaking: casting, location, use of color, production design, camera, lighting, sound design and editing.

DESG-GT 1038   Lecture   2 Credits

Open only to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film.


An introduction to the unique qualities of opera as a performing art and as a viable medium in which to practice theater design. This class requires students to listen and react to carefully chosen works, to attend and discuss an opera performance, to begin to think about opera performance in relationship to design, and to participate in a multitude of classroom discussions covering a wide range of topics related to the art, craft, and business of opera, as well as some historical, dramaturgical and contemporary cultural context.

DESG-GT.1034  Lecture  2 Credits

Instructor(s): Helfrich (Section 002)

Only open to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film.

As theater and film artists, we are constantly required to react to new and unfamiliar work: in performance, on screen, at public and private readings, in scripts. The ability to think and talk about the work you encounter is an essential part of finding your voice and identity as an artist. At each class, we will discuss an assigned play, screenplay, or theater production. Brief written responses may be assigned before each class. This is not a literary analysis class, or a theater history class. The scripts are chosen for individual merits and also, as a collection, to constitute a broad range of ideas and challenges, but the collection is not chronological, nor drawn from any single genre, style, or cultural context. It is an intentionally diverse and eclectic set of texts. Students are encouraged to investigate each text as deeply as possible on your own; this should include, at a minimum, familiarizing yourself with the author and identifying some basic historical and cultural context in which to begin to understand the play.

DESG-GT.1014  Lecture  3 Credits

Only open to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film.

In this class we will be learning to use new and emerging design tools and exploring different ways of integrating them into our design processes. The focus will be on 3D modeling and 2D image-making. The intention is to give each student the tools they need to effectively model a scene in 3 dimensions, and use that model to create compelling images which tell the story of their designs.

DESG-GT.1213  Lecture  4 Credits

Instructor(s): Myers

Only open to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film.

A collaboration with the Tisch Graduate Film Program. Six teams (director, production designer, costume designer, director of photography) collaborate to produce a portfolio quality short film shot on location with high levels of production value, including locations, props, and costumes. This course underlines the essential aspects of the collaboration process and focuses on the team effort of producing a film.

DESG-GT 1210-1211   Lecture  5 Credits

Instructor(s): Nishikawa

Open only to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film. 

The course builds on the skills and techniques learned in Set Design I and II where the student has developed a process defined and shaped by a coherent, logical and practical approach to design. Participation in class depends upon drawing, drafting and model making skills primarily learned in auxiliary classes. While these tools are always discussed as tools in the design process and specific skill problems are addressed in individual criticism, it is assumed that students begin the class with the ability to communicate their ideas clearly. During the Spring semester students will focus on their thesis projects in individual critique meetings with professors and guests. 

Participation in group discussion is considered an essential part of every class. Expressing ideas in a clear, non-judgmental way is an essential tool in the collaborative process. Each student’s work is critiqued at every class. Students are expected to be present for all presentations, not just their own.

DESG-GT 1017   Lecture  3 Credits

Instructor(s): Nishikawa

Open only to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film. 

The main purpose of this course is supporting students’ design process for the projects in Set Design III course. We will explore creative ways to use tools and materials, and investigate and practice high-level skills that should be acquired by set designers in their design process; such as building firm structures and textural surfaces, and 3 dimensional details for model making, lighting methods for model photography, and organizing drawing packets. We will also focus on looking at models as representation of realized full scale sets, to figure out the construction and technical matters that could occur in the real productions. Participation in group discussion is considered an essential part of every class. Expressing ideas in a clear, non-judgmental way is an essential tool in the collaborative process. Each student’s work is critiqued at every class. Students are expected to be present for all presentations, not just their own.

DESG-GT 1500-1501   Lecture   2 Credits

Open only to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film.

The class is a forum for Year 3 students in production from all three disciplines. The class slot allows for weekly production meeting times, and budgeting process meetings. You should not schedule work study or PA time during this slot unless your production assignment is completely finished.

DESG-GT 2002-2003   Lecture   3 Credits

Instructor(s): Cokorinos

Open only to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film. 


The topics covered in this course are planned to assist you as a third year student to ease your transition from graduate school into the professional working community. We will provide you with a wide spectrum of information, much of which you have not explored in other Design Department courses. Guest speakers include recent alumni, a tax specialist, union representatives and an agent.

DESG-GT 1141   Lecture   3 Credits

Open only to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film. 

In conjunction with collaborators from the Public Theatre, five set and costume students work in teams. Emphasis is placed on conceptual work conceived through discussion that gives equal weight to all members of the collaboration.

DESG-GT.1034  Lecture  2 Credits

Instructor(s): Helfrich (Section 002)

Only open to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film.

As theater and film artists, we are constantly required to react to new and unfamiliar work: in performance, on screen, at public and private readings, in scripts. The ability to think and talk about the work you encounter is an essential part of finding your voice and identity as an artist. At each class, we will discuss an assigned play, screenplay, or theater production. Brief written responses may be assigned before each class. This is not a literary analysis class, or a theater history class. The scripts are chosen for individual merits and also, as a collection, to constitute a broad range of ideas and challenges, but the collection is not chronological, nor drawn from any single genre, style, or cultural context. It is an intentionally diverse and eclectic set of texts. Students are encouraged to investigate each text as deeply as possible on your own; this should include, at a minimum, familiarizing yourself with the author and identifying some basic historical and cultural context in which to begin to understand the play.

DESG-GT.1214  Lecture  4 Credits

Instructor(s): Myers

Only open to students in the Department of Design for Stage and Film.

The course is an introduction to Production Design. A deep dive into the story, art and design in making a film by focusing throughout the semester on a single film project. During the arc of the project, students will production design a film including renderings, ground plans, models, location photos and mood boards with color and materials, prop, furniture and character casting and costumes ideas.

DESG-GT 1060/DESG-GT 1061

1-2 credits

With the permission of the chair, students may participate in an individualized project or internship to gain professional experience related to their specific design concentration or to investigate an area or field of study not normally covered in the department’s regularly scheduled course offerings.  The schedule for the project must not interfere with courses that are required components of the curriculum and the scope of work is contingent upon approval by the chair.

The project should provide hands-on experience; students may work with a faculty advisor. Students must submit a written proposal of their project to the chair for review. The proposal should outline project concepts, expectations and goals as well as desired credits and plans for meeting with an advisor. Students will be registered by the department administrator upon acceptance of the proposal.