GABRIEL HAINER EVANSOHN
Partner, Co-Founder, and Lead Designer
Gabriel Hainer Evansohn: Gabriel is a production and experience designer, visual artist and production manager. He specializes in creating immersive physical landscapes, large-scale site-specific installations, and cohesive worlds for performers and audiences to inhabit. He is a Partner and Co-Founder of Iron Bloom Creative Production. He is also a founder of Woodshed Collective, one of America’s leading immersive theater companies, and has been their Director of Production and Resident Production Designer since 2006.
On Broadway Gabriel has designed Titanique the Musical at the St. James Theater, with Grace Laubacher. He was also the designer of Titanique off Broadway at the Daryl Roth Theater (Winner of the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical), at the Criterion theater on the West End (Winner of the Olivier Awards for Best New Entertainment or Comedy Play), at the Lido Theater in Paris, and for the Canadian and Australian tours.
He also designed and co-conceived, with Jason Kim and Woodshed Collective, KPOP the Musical on Broadway at the Circle in the Square Theater as well as the immersive version off-Broadway installed over 3 theaters at ART/New York (Winner Lucille Lortel for Outstanding Musical, and nominated for Lucille Lortel for Outstanding Scenic Design)
He was the Experience Director and co-Scenic Design (with Grace Laubacher) of Life and Trust, a 100,00sq/ft immersive experience that reimagined the Faust myth and set in the Gilded Age of NYC and culminating in the stock market crash of 1929. Installed in the financial district over 6 floors it included over 100 scenic locations and installations.
With Woodshed Collective, Gabriel has co-conceived, production designed and production managed Empire Travel Agency, an immersive performance staged throughout lower Manhattan, with design and installation in subways, parks, storage units, cars, sidewalks, art galleries and culminating in a 400-year-old Customs House by the South Street Seaport. It was named by The Guardian as one of the top 10 New York Theater pieces of 2015, calling it, “Surprising, innovative, and almost impossibly exciting, it was a show whose limited budget was no curb on its boundless imagination.” The New York Times described it as “…Gloriously inventive and appallingly fun. What this play does, perhaps better than any piece since Deborah Warner’s “Angel Project,” is use the city itself as a set....”
Additionally, credits for Woodshed include:
The Tenant in the West Park Church and Parish House, “Woodshed Collective has, with great imagination and wonderful detail, transformed the old five-story West-Park Presbyterian Church into a ramshackle Parisian apartment building (and its environs) circa the nineteen-sixties... The only downside is that, because the scenes are taking place all over the church at the same time, you can’t see everything” – The New Yorker. “The production designer, Gabriel Hainer Evansohn, ... created a series of spaces so evocative that you feel like you’ve wandered onto the set of a mid-60s Godard film.” —Lighting and Sound America.
The Confidence Man on a decommissioned Steamship in the Hudson River (5 Stars: Time Out NY, “an impressively cohesive piece of installation art” — Variety, “a work of dazzling genius, a spellbinding feat of collective creativity” and “One of the best shows I’ve ever seen in NYC” —The Gothamist.
12 Ophelias, set in the empty McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn (“Beautiful” — The New Yorker”, “A deconstructed masterstroke” — New York Press).
Other projects include: WEER (Cherry Lane Theater / A24), Row (WTF / dir. Tyne Rafaeli) installed in the Reflecting Pool of the Clark Art Institute, Nevermore Park (Hebru Brantley / MWM) a 6000 sq/ft installation in Chicago, Sweeny Todd at Barrow Street Theater (Winner- Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Revival 2017) with IBCP partner William Irons and Designer Simon Kenny. He was Production Manager for Variety Worldwide, leading the renovation of the storied venue, The Diamond Horseshoe, now Sony Hall, at the Paramount Hotel in NYC, and managed the build and installation of their immersive, circus, dinner performance event, The Queen of the Night (2014), directed by Christine Jones.
Additionally, his work has been seen at festivals including Mondegreen, Electric Forest, Firefly, Outside Lands, Bonnaroo, Clusterfest, and Lost Lake, museums including the ICA Boston and Oklahoma Contemporary. Corporate Events for clients including Audible, Bloomberg L.P., Lyft, Oath, Ford, Amazon among others and theaters and schools throughout NYC including The Park Avenue Armory, The Public, HERE Arts Center, 3LD, 59e59, Incubator Arts Project, Ars Nova, Theater Row, Playwrights Horizons Theater School, Barnard College and the Atlantic Acting School where he worked as the Stage 2 Production Manager and Resident Designer for 5 years.
He was born and raised in New York city and is a graduate of Vassar College.
Resume and full portfolio available upon request.
gabriel@ironbloomny.com