Cameron Anderson is an internationally acclaimed scenic designer who creates environments for theatre and opera rich in emotional resonance and symbolic meaning. In a professional career spanning more than two decades, Anderson has distinguished herself as a visual storyteller par excellence. The virtuosity of Anderson’s work is evidenced best by her expansive portfolio, which includes designs at many of the world’s leading theatre and opera companies. A hallmark of Anderson’s designs is an evocative play with scale, exaggeration, distortion, and embellishment. These more expressionistic elements serve to defamiliarize the familiar for spectators, thereby inviting them to grapple with, say, the interior life of an opera’s central character or a latent theme in the textual unconscious of a drama in unexpected ways. The environments Anderson creates reveal a keen understanding of the tremendous impact that the visual images we place on stage can have on an audience. Spectatorship, of course, is a social practice, one that we have come to rely on heavily to make sense and meaning of our world. Anderson fully embraces the idea that audience members are co-creators of performance events and brings a similar understanding to her work with collaborators. So too is her boundless creativity, artistic integrity, and profound humanity.
