Luke Cantarella

Luke Cantarella is a designer of scenery and spaces for performance. Currently a resident of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Luke was born outside of Philadelphia, studied at Northwestern University and received his M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama. Luke is an associate professor at Pace University. From 2008-2012 he ran the set design program at the University of California-Irvine. Additionally Luke is a member of the Wingspace Design Collective.

Luke has designed scenery for over 130 productions around the country and internationally. Regional theater credits include the American Repertory Theater, Milwaukee Rep, Cleveland Playhouse, Pittsburgh Public Theater, Yale Repertory Theater, Repertory Theater of St. Louis, TheaterWorks (Hartford), Berkshire Theater Festival, Asolo Repertory Theater, People’s Light, Wolftrap Opera, Baltimore Opera/Peabody Institute, Curtis Institute of Music, Northlight Theater and many others.

Dance projects include numerous pieces for The Wooden Floor with choreographers Mark Haim, Jeff Slayton, Melanie Rios-Glaser, and Susan Rethorst; Karinne Keithley-Syers’ Another Tree Dance at the Mount Tremper Arts/Chocolate Factory, Patrick Corbin’s Constrained, and Noemie LaFrance’s Noir (2004 Whitney Biennial).

His New York credits include the premieres at the Atlantic Theater Company, New World Stages, Lucille Lortel, HERE Arts Center, Connolly Theater, Sheen Center, and The Lambs. Internationally, his work has been seen at the Arts Theater (London West End), American University-Cairo, and with the Transversal Theater Company at the Rozentheater (Amsterdam), the Interferences Festival (Cluj, Romania) and many other locales.

In compliment to his work as a scenic designer, Luke creates projects in design ethnography, a hybrid form that uses design thinking as a tool for social-science research. Working in collaboration with Christine Hegel and George Marcus, cultural anthropologists, their projects include 214 Sq. Ft (2012), a multi-sited installation work that recreates a motel room as inhabited by a family of six developed with Project Hope, an advocacy group for homeless families in Orange County, California; Trade is Sublime (2013), a multi-channel video installation of three improvised dance films created as an intervention at the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.