Prep Materials for Es Devlin’s 2025 MIT McDermott Award Residency
Event details and background information for Es Devlin’s visit to MIT as part of the 2025 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT.
About the McDermott Award
Established in 1974 by Margaret McDermott (1912–2018), the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT is bestowed upon individuals whose artistic trajectory and body of work have achieved the highest distinction in their field and indicate they will remain leaders for years to come. The McDermott Award reflects MIT’s commitment to risk-taking, problem solving, and connecting creative minds across disciplines.
About the Campus Residency
A distinctive feature of the McDermott Award is a campus residency, which includes a celebratory event at which the Award is presented, a public presentation of the artist’s work and significant interactions with students, faculty, and staff. The goal of the residency is to provide the recipient unparalleled access to the creative energy and cutting-edge research found in the MIT community, and to have the recipient connect with departments, laboratories, and research centers throughout the Institute in ways that will be mutually enlightening.
About Es Devlin
Artist Es Devlin (born 1971, London, England) views an audience as a temporary society and often invites public participation in communal choral works. Her canvas ranges from public sculptures and installations at Tate Modern, V&A, Serpentine, Imperial War Museum and Lincoln Center to kinetic stage designs at the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre and the Metropolitan Opera, as well as Olympic Games ceremonies, Super Bowl halftime shows, and monumental illuminated stage sculptures for large-scale stadium concerts.
Devlin is the subject of a major monographic book, An Atlas of Es Devlin, described by Thames & Hudson as their most intricate and sculptural publication to date,and a retrospective exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York.
In 2020, Devlin became the first female architect of the UK Pavilion at a World Expo, conceiving a building which used AI to co-author poetry with visitors on its 20 meter diameter facade. Her practice was the subject of the 2015 Netflix documentary series Abstract: The Art of Design. She is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and the University of the Arts London, and is a Royal Designer for Industry at the Royal Society of Arts. She has been awarded the London Design Medal, three Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, an Ivor Novello Award, doctorates from the University of Bristol and the University of Kent and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).
More at Es Devlin’s website
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MIT Face to Face Exhibition and Discussion
When
Exhibition on display April 28–30, 2025 (M: 12–6pm, T: 10am-9pm, W: 10am-4pm)
Discussion with Es Devlin and Participants on April 29, 2025 / 5:00–6:30pm
Where
Tull Concert Hall, Edward and Joyce Linde Music building, W18
What
Inspired by Es Devlin’s Congregation, more than 100 members of the MIT community have created MIT Face to Face, a series of drawings that together form a collective portrait of the MIT community. Throughout the spring semester, members of the MIT community attended one of several facilitated drawing sessions in which they drew and interviewed a partner they didn’t know before. A collection of the resulting portraits is displayed in the round inside Tull Concert Hall, in the recently opened Edward and Joyce Linde Music building.
Prep Material
Congregation
St Mary le Strand church, London, England, 2024
A large-scale art installation that features portraits of 50 Londoners who have experienced displacement. The portraits, rendered in chalk and charcoal, are accompanied by animations, soundscapes, and choral performances.
• Watch a video
Article: designboom
Es Devlin on drawing 50 people displaced from their homelands for her installation in London.
BBC: Experience artist Es Devlin’s powerful new work
Dive into the emotional depth of Congregation and see how art can illuminate powerful human stories.
A Design Conversation with Es Devlin
When
April 28, 2025 / 5:00-6:30pm
Where
MIT Design Studio, W97-261
What
Moderated by Sara Brown, this session invites design students from architecture, art, and theater to engage directly with Es Devlin, whose visionary work spans stage design, architecture, and large immersive installations. The conversation will center on some of Es Devlin’s most celebrated works, including The Lehman Trilogy, Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (2025), as well as her designs for large-scale events including Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour 2023 and the London Olympics Closing Ceremony 2012.
Prep Material
A Symphony of British Music
London Olympics Closing Ceremony, 2012
The ceremony featured more than 4,100 performers, including 3,500 adult volunteers and 380 schoolchildren from the six east London host boroughs.
The Lehman Trilogy
Debuted at Royal National Theatre, 2018
A rotating glass box manifests as a mid-century office, its boardroom vocabulary setting the scene for the unfolding tragedy for this set design on The Lehman Trilogy.
Beyonce’s Renaissance Tour
World Tour, 2023
Devlin created a massive cinema screen perforated by a spherical portal—a 50-foot wide aperture—from which the real star, her dancers and musicians could emerge and withdraw between songs.
Culture in Quarantine Master Class
Self-filmed in her South London studio and using just paper, scissors, and glue, Es Devlin guides viewers through the process of turning ideas into forms from broad research and initial sketches to physical projection-mapped sculpture.
Abstract: The Art of Design
Netflix Series
Step inside the minds of the most innovative designers in a variety of disciplines and learn how design impacts every aspect of life. In this episode: Stage designer Es Devlin crafts evocative sets for concerts, operas, plays and runway shows using light, film, sculpture— and even rain.
Library of Light
Cortile d’onore del Palazzo di Brera, Milan, 2025
A journey through science, philosophy, and spirituality to put light back at the centre of the narrative.
• Read the press release
Climate and Care: A Conversation with Es Devlin
When
April 29, 2025 / 11:30am–1:00pm
Where
MIT Long Lounge (7-429)
What
A thought-provoking discussion on Es Devlin’s climate-focused installations will be moderated by Ana Miljački and explore the artistic and environmental impact of works such as Come Home Again (Tate Modern), Conference of the Trees (COP26), Forest for Change (The Global Goals Pavilion), and Forest of Us (Superblue).
Prep Material
Forest of Us
Superblue Miami, Florida, 2018
Forest of Us takes as its starting point the striking visual symmetries between the structures within us that allow us to breathe and the structures around us that make breathing possible: the bronchial trees that exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide within our lungs and the trees which exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen within our environment.
• Article: Miami New Times
Memory Palace
Exhibited at Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London, England, 2019
Visitors are immersed within a vast chronological landscape mapping pivotal shifts in human perspective over 75 millennia.
• Article: Pitzhanger
Come Home Again
Tate Modern Garden, London, England, 2021
Commissioned by Cartier and made with guidance from the London Wildlife Trust, Es Devlin drew 243 endangered species listed on London’s priority conservation list including moths, birds, beetles, wildflowers, fish, and fungi to invoke her advocacy to protect biodiversity.
• Article: Design Boom
Conference of the Trees
COP26, Glasgow, Scotland, 2021
For the New York Times Climate Hub at COP 26, Es Devlin Amassed a Conference of the Trees to bare witness. The Forest comprised 197 trees, one for each of the 197 countries gathered in Glasgow.
Forest for Change
Somerset House, London, England, 2021
At the heart of the Forest, a central clearing revealed a pavilion consisting of 17 mirrored pillars, representing the UN Global Goals for people and planet through inspiring quotes and facts about the world we live in.
• Article: Global Goals
What’s New in AI: A Conversation with Es Devlin Moderated by John Guttag
When
April 30, 2025 / 5:00–6:30pm
Reception to follow from 6:30-7:30pm
Where
Tull Concert Hall, Edward and Joyce Linde Music building, W18
What
Hosted by Dugald C. Jackson Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, John Guttag, featuring brief presentations by leading experts in the field:
Generative AI, Generative Art and the Library of Babel by Jacob Andreas, Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS)
Language as a Camera by Phillip Isola, Class of 1948 Career Development Professor and Associate Professor, EECS
Building Rational Robots by Leslie Kaelbling, Panasonic Professor, EECS
Following the presentations, there will be a conversation and Q&A with Es Devlin, the 2025 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts recipient. Devlin will discuss her work at the intersection of AI and the arts, including her groundbreaking Poem Pavilion project, which explores the fusion of technology and human expression.
Prep Material
Poem Portraits
Serpentine Galleries, London, England, 2019
Poem Portraits is an experimental, collective artwork, woven at the intersection of AI and human creativity – combining poetry, design and machine learning – conceived by artist and designer Es Devlin in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture Lab and Creative Technologist Ross Goodwin.
• Experiments with Google
Please, Feed the Lions
Trafalgar Square, London, England, 2019
Cast in 1867, four bronze lions have been sitting silently in Trafalgar Square, mute witnesses to every voice of protest, demonstration and celebration for over 150 years. If one of these lions could open its mouth and speak today: what would it say?
• Article: The Verge
The Poem Pavilion
UK Pavilion, Dubai Expo, United Arab Emirates, 2021
Every visitor is invited to add a word as they enter this giant wooden musical instrument – they emerge through a twenty metre diameter collective poem in which their word is included.
• Article: Arch Daily