Sara Brown
- Associate Professor of Theater Arts
- Associate Head, Theater Arts Program
- saralb@mit.edu
- Office
- 4-215
- Phone
- (617) 710-3378
- Web
- sarabdesign.com
Brown’s 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 for The 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, developed in part at MIT, 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 sex positions from the Kama Sutra 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.
Brown is currently developing an adaptation of Thomas Bernhard’s novel Woodcutters at MIT with director Shira Milikowsky, actor Adriane Krstansky, and dramaturg Lauren K. Wolfe. This project is an artistic answer to the question of what it means to contribute to a cultural world when the real world is falling apart. Woodcutters is supported by a MITHIC Humanities Cultivation Grant and a Faculty Grant from the Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST). The work will be developed in residencies on Martha’s Vineyard with Circuit Arts and at MIT with the support of Music & Theater Arts.
At MIT, Brown is an Associate Professor of Theater Arts, where she has taught since 2008. Her teaching includes core design classes such as 21T.001: Fundamentals of Stage Technology, 21T.220: Set Design, and 21T.121: 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 a 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 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, Brown 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 onstage and in the classroom as a means of cultivating empathy, imagination, and resilience.
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