Ian Garrett is a producer, designer and administrator, dedicated to innovative arts infrastructure. He is co-founder and a director of the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts (CSPA), a leader in the conversation on sustainability development and the arts.
As a producer, he worked on the premier of Richard Forman and Michael Gordon’s opera What to Wear at REDCAT and toured Torry Bend’s adaptation of Aimee Bender’s Loser to Prague. He is the producer for CalArts Festival Theater, having produced dozens shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), including Marsian De Lellis’ Growing Up Linda, Katie Shook and Erik Ehn’s One Eye Gone, and At Sundown—a physical theater piece on aging and memory that he initiated. In Los Angeles, he produced the hit Gogol Project with the Rogue Artists Ensemble and Leiris/Picasso with Brimmer Street Theatre Company, both at the Bootleg Theater. In Houston, he produced Week 42 of Suzan-Lori Parks’365 Days / 365 Plays. He was an associate producer on The Medea Project, a cross-cultural production of Medea in Athens and Los Angeles.
Ian maintains a design practice focused on lighting, with work in scenic, media and systems design. He served as the lighting curator for Scenofest at the 2011 Prague Quadrennial, and is the resident designer for the Indy Convergence, an annual artistic open-space/pop-up residency in Indianapolis. He received the 2006 LA Weekly Theater Award for best lighting for Permanent Collection at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, and was the lighting designer for 2008’s Song of Extinction with Moving Arts Theater, which won the 2008 LA Weekly Theater Award for Production of the Year. Recent design work includes the tour of Kristina Wong’s Cat lady (Houston, San Francisco, Tampa), Hyperbole: Origins (Rogue Artists Ensemble at [Inside] the Ford), On Emotion (Son of Semele Ensemble), Summer in Hell (Brimmer Street Theatre Company at Studio/Stage) and Marat/Sade (Pomona College). Previous credits include: Leiris/Picasso (Brimmer Street Theatre Company/Bootleg Theater),<3 (Brimmer Street at Studio/Stage), Speech and Debate (Blank Theatre Company),Body Politic (Echo Theatre Company), and dozens of others. His was part of the lighting team for Crimson Collective’s Ascension, a 150’ wide, origami-style crane sculpture at the 2010 Coachella Music Festival; designed on the veranda at the Alden Hotel for the Houston Grand Opera; and engineered the DiverseWorks Gallery for Claude Wampler’s Performance (career ender) installation.
In 2010, Ian traveled to Cancun, Mexico, to cover the cultural response to COP16, the UN Climate Change Conference, and travled to Copenhagen in 2009 for COP15. With the CSPA, he has been featured in American Theatre, DramaBiz, The Design Magazine, and on Inhabitat.com. He has spoken on arts and the environment, arts infrastructure, and new models of training at St. Louis University, Live Design International, and the annual conferences for the Theatre Communications Group (TCG), DanceUSA, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, Americans for the Arts, and the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. In 2007, he received the Richard E. Sherwood Award for emerging theater artists from the Center Theater Group (CTG) for the integration of ecologically sustainable practice into theater production.
Ian was the Executive Director of Fresh Arts Coalition, an arts service organization focused on awareness and marketing access for small arts organizations. He has served as consultant and interim staff for the LA Stage Alliance (LASA), a regional arts service organization. LASA serves more than 350 non-profit performing arts companies in Southern California. While at LASA, he ran the LA Stage Times program, a partnership with the Los Angeles Times for arts visibility, and developed the LA Stage Blog, the portal for news on Los Angeles performance. He has also served as group sales associate for Stages Repertory Theatre in Houston, spent the 2007 Fall/Winter season in a residency with DiverseWorks, and was patron services manager for the Will Geer Theatricum Botancium in Topanga, CA.
From 2008 – 2010, Ian taught for the School of Theater at California Institute of the Arts, including courses on production and management technology and sustainable practice. He has also led communications for the School of Theater, developing its web identity and digital infrastructure.
Ian received dual MFAs in Lighting Design and Producing from CalArts, and has a BA in Architectural Studies and Art History from Rice University. More info and a portfolio of his work is available at www.toasterlab.com and the CSPA’s website at www.sustainablepractice.org
