Es Devlin named as next Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor
Es Devlin appointed Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre 2025-2026
St Catherine’s College is delighted to announce that Es Devlin has been appointed as the 30th Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Oxford University for the academic year 2025-2026.
The Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professorship, attached to St Catherine’s College and created thanks to a generous donation by Sir Cameron Mackintosh, was inaugurated by Stephen Sondheim in 1990, followed by a distinguished list of professors including Sir Nicholas Hytner, Arthur Miller, Dame Diana Rigg, Sir Richard Eyre, Phyllida Lloyd, Sir Ian McKellen, Stephen Fry, Lord Richard Attenborough, Deborah Warner, Stephen Daldry, Sir Tom Stoppard, Adjoa Andoh and most recently Sir Greg Doran.
Es Devlin is a distinguished artist whose luminous participatory artworks have been shown at the V&A, Serpentine, Somerset House, Imperial War Museum and Lincoln Center, as well as outside at Tate Modern and Trafalgar Square. She is also one of the world’s most influential and exciting stage designers, known for blending art and technology in theatre, opera, dance, Olympic ceremonies and Super Bowl half-time shows, as well as large scale concerts with Beyoncé, The Weekend and U2’s inaugural show at the Sphere. She was the first female architect of the UK Pavilion at the World Expo 2021, using AI to create a 20-metre diameter participatory poem. Her design for the National Theatre’s production of The Lehman Trilogy won a Tony award and she has also been awarded three Olivier awards, fellowships at the Royal Academy of Music and University of the Arts London, doctorates from the Universities of Bristol and Kent, the Eugene McDermott Award for the Arts at MIT ( Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and a CBE. Her practice was the subject of a major retrospective at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York and a landmark sculptural publication, An Atlas of Es Devlin. She is an ambitious and a disruptive thinker, who ideates in response to text and situation in provocative and arresting ways.
We look forward to welcoming Es to Oxford in Michaelmas 2025.
Es Devlin said: It’s a great honour to be offered this opportunity to encounter students from every discipline in this storied institution, through the lens of theatre.
Sir Cameron Mackintosh said: I am especially thrilled that Es Devlin will be the Visiting Professor this year.
When my Chair was set up, I always wanted it to be awarded to someone still working at the top of their profession and I got off to a very good start with Stephen Sondheim, with so many subsequent brilliant talents.
However, this is certainly the first time our Professor has been both celebrated and experienced in so many branches of the arts, both as a theatrical designer extraordinaire and artist. Her extraordinary body of work has ranged from high drama, dance, operas and musicals to pop spectacular in places as diverse as the London Palladium, the Bush Theatre and the closing of the Olympic Games in London. Along the way, she has dazzled the catwalks of Paris and the great arenas of the world with an array of some of the biggest stars of our times. When not collecting awards for her own work, she has designed many of the major awards shows for other people.
Es is definitely a global phenomenon and her imagination seems infinite. Oxford is in for a very special treat!
The Pro-Master of St Catherine’s College, Naomi Freud, said: ‘The College is privileged and excited to welcome the exciting, inclusive and innovative Es Devlin as the new Cameron Mackintosh Professor. I am impressed by the body and diversity of Es’s work and I am eager to see the collaborative work of our students she will facilitate and enhance.’