As a scenic design student, a lot of my experience has been based in creative activity. Between taking creative courses, participating in student films, designing student-led stage productions, producing and designing three Chaddock & Morrow College of Fine Arts (CMCoFA) Fringe Festival productions, and assisting in scenic design for Tantrum Theater productions, I dived deep into the Ohio Honors Creative Activity Pathway.

​​

I have been taking design classes since my freshman year, but when I joined OHP as a junior after completing my time in the 1804 Scholars program, I had the opportunity to take courses that, while not explicitly rooted in creativity, opened my eyes to tools I could use in my creative endeavors. One of these courses I originally signed up to take for fun was The Maker Movement and STEAM - a course about coding and engineering. I took so much away from that course and how I could use it towards future projects, but I would not have thought that I was going to walk away with what turned out to be a proof of concept for making model boxes light up, using my capstone model box as my first lit model. It inspired me to further experiment with coding lights in model boxes, which will be a tandem experiment after taking a lighting design course and learning how to play and think about light as a scenic designer, adventuring into theatrical lighting concepts.

​​

Even without the encouragement of OHP, I was very involved with my peers and professors in productions, often doing three to four projects a school year, depending on their scale. Out of all the creative experiences I have had, my two favorite experiences of designing in the School of Theater were with peers on an MA production of Noah Haidle’s Mr. Marmalade as the scenic designer and on Tantrum Theater’s production of Robert Edwin Lee’s Inherit the Wind as an assistant scenic designer. Both of these shows, as one can imagine, were vastly different.

​​

On Mr. Marmalade, I experienced what it was like to work as a scenic designer with a team on a production as a voice with experience, and not just someone doing it for fun, as I had a couple of other experiences before this production that gave me the confidence to work on this classmate’s MA production. The most important lesson I learned working on Mr. Marmalade was time management and the importance of work-life balance, as there were a couple of occasions of trading my free time to work as a one-woman team instead of taking time for myself.

​​

On Tantrum Theater’s Inherit the Wind, I learned what working in a professional theater was like, as I was not overseen by my professor or MFA design student while I assisted the guest scenic designer. I got to experience a new type of collaboration between scenic designers and assistant scenic designers that was different from my last assistant position. I was trusted with doing detailed work that impacted the world of the play with bunting and a variation of a historic banner – both of which hung for all or most of the show. I also gained valuable connections with the director and scenic designer on this production, opening up my network of artists.

​​

I would not trade any of my creative experiences for anything else, and if it were not for the constraint of time, I probably would have done more! Every experience I have had, good and bad, I learned valuable lessons from for building my skills and learning who I am as an artist.