Biography
British artist Es Devlin (born London 1971) views an audience as a temporary society and invites public participation in communal choral works.
Her practice ranges from public sculptures and installations outside at Tate Modern, Trafalgar Square, and Lincoln Centre, and inside the V&A, Serpentine, Imperial War Museum and Somerset House, to kinetic stage designs at the Royal Opera House, the Metropolitan Opera and the National Theatre, as well as Olympic Ceremonies, Super-Bowl halftime shows and monumental illuminated stage sculptures for large scale stadium concerts in collaboration with the world’s most celebrated musicians.
Devlin is the subject of a monographic book, An Atlas of Es Devlin and a retrospective exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, as well as a major solo exhibition at Casa Bradesco, Sao Paulo, with further monographic exhibitions scheduled to open in 2026 at London’s Design Museum and Powerhouse Parramatta. In 2020 she became the first female architect of the UK Pavilion at a World Expo, conceiving a building which used AI to co-author poetry with visitors on its 20 metre diameter facade. Her practice was the subject of the 2017 Netflix documentary series Abstract: The Art Of Design.
She is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal Society of Arts. She is visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre, and Bloomberg Fellow at the University of Oxford, and has been awarded the Eugene McDermott Award for the Arts at MIT, the Critics Circle Award for Contribution to the Arts, Frame Lifetime Achievement Award 2025, the Wall Street Journal Innovator Award, The London Design Medal, three Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, an Ivor Novello Award, doctorates from the Universities of Bristol and Kent and a CBE.
Studio
None of Es's work would be possible without the extraordinary teams who develop and deliver the designs. These range in size depending on the scale of the project.
The associate designers who regularly collaborate with Es in the studio developing the initial concepts and design intent are:
Scarlett Moloney
Trained in architecture at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
Claudia Fragoso
Trained in architecture at Cambridge and the Royal College of Art.
Victoria Bosch
Trained in architecture at the Etsam, School of Architecture, of UPM, Polytechnic University of Madrid.
Zoe Diakaki
Trained in architecture at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and in Design for Performance and Interaction at the Bartlett School of Architecture.
Alice Hallifax
Trained in theatre design at Nottingham Trent University
Temitayo Shonibare
Trained in interior design at Pratt Institute and Master of Fine Arts at Goldsmiths University of London
The junior associate designers who regularly collaborate with Es in the studio are:
Anna Niamh Gorman
Trained in Theatre Design at the Wimbledon College of Arts, University of the Arts London and Advanced Theatre Practice at the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, University of London.