Joshua Higgason

  • Professor of the Practice of Theater Arts
Email
higgason@mit.edu
Office
W97-268
Phone
(617) 253-2877
Headshot of Joshua Higgason.

Joshua Higgason is a designer, researcher, and educator whose work expands the possibilities of live performance through emerging media and technologies.

Working across video, projection, lighting, scenic, and interactive media, Higgason creates experimental, immersive, systems-based performances and hybrid forms that shape relationships between performers, environments, and viewers in real time. His practice approaches performance as a dynamic field of perception where physical and digital space, live bodies, and responsive systems converge to produce new modes of experience.

Higgason’s work has been presented at international venues including the Bayreuther Festspiele, Teatro alla Scala, Venice Biennale, Salzburger Festspiele, Staatsoper Berlin, the Edinburgh International Festival, and major American institutions such as the Kennedy Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center, Walker Arts Center, NYC Opera, SFO, Carnegie Hall, TED, and SXSW.

At the Bayreuther Festspiele, Higgason developed one of the first fully integrated, large-scale deployments of augmented reality in opera for Parsifal, directed by Jay Scheib. This work established new technical and dramaturgical frameworks for synchronizing augmented reality (AR) with live performance at the scale of a major opera house, advancing AR as a scenographic system capable of extending narrative space, embodiment, and perception in real time.

His projects span opera, theater, dance, and installation, including Omar, Powder Her Face, Émigré with the New York Philharmonic, and White Girl in Danger, for which he received Drama Desk and Henry Hewes Award nominations. His design for Hansel und Gretel at La Scala received the Italian National Association of Music Critics’ Franco Abiati Award.

Higgason has collaborated with artists including Jay Scheib, Kaneza Schaal, Sufjan Stevens, Radiolab, Ira Glass, Lucinda Childs, Daniel Fish, Julian Crouch, The Builders Association, Big Dance Theater, and The Windmill Factory.

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