ABOUT
Joseph Amodei (they/them) is a new media artist, theater designer, activist, and educator. Their work seeks to make material differences with and for people at the intersection of art, emerging technology, and community. Joseph grew up in North Carolina, where they received a BFA in Studio Art from UNC-Chapel Hill. Joseph completed their MFA in Video and Media Design at Carnegie Mellon. They are an assistant professor of Media Design in Lehigh University's Department of Theater. Recent work has explored immersive archive creation + Virtual Reality, mediated storytelling amplifying the Black history of the South, gameplay + gerrymandering, the HIV/AIDS crisis + performance of queer care, and Human Centered Design + issues of health equity.
This past summer, their media design for the dance floor, the hospital room, and the kitchen table, (New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center, Theater Communications Group’s National Conference, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, National Performance Network) – a show about archiving queer care across pandemics – was selected to represent the USA in the emerging category at the Prague Quadrennial, what USITT calls, “the Olympics of performance design.”
Selected Media Design highlights: Finding Freedom: The Journey of Robert Smalls (the Gaillard Center), They Do Not Know Harlem (Playmakers Repertory), House of Telescopes (Pipeline Theatre Company), To Buy the Sun: The Challenge of Pauli Murray (Hidden Voices); Amm(i)gone (Woolly Mammoth); Packing and Cracking: Gerrymandering through Gameplay (The PA Center for Women and Politics, UNC’s Process Series, SFX); This Emancipation Thing (RedCat); The Young Playwrights Festival (City Theater Company of Pittsburgh), My Mouth is a Queer Time Machine (Ars Nova); The Pattern at Pendarvis (HERE Arts Center); and The Clothesline Muse (National Black Theater Festival).