Nicolas Benacerraf

Scenic Designer, Academic, Activist

Nicolas Benacerraf is an academic, organizer, and artist who creates and studies live performance. As a director and scenographer, Nic engineers live human encounters in theaters, galleries, concert halls, and streets. He is Founding co-Artistic Director of The Assembly (“a cutting-edge theater collective” - New York Times), an NYC-based company dedicated to building collaborative works about pressing social issues. In 2015, he partnered with Lincoln Center and Trusty Sidekick Theatre Company to create UP & AWAY, the nation’s first major theater piece built specifically for children on the autism spectrum. It received national and international press coverage (NBC Nightly News, Al Jazeera, etc.), and was revived at Lincoln Center for two encore runs (most recently in 2018).

He has designed scenery and/or led the creative teams for over 60 professional productions in NYC and beyond, and is the recipient of an LA Weekly Set Design Award. In his academic practice, Nic writes about contemporary theater, and also studies advertising as a means of theatrical population control. He is currently a doctoral student in Theatre & Performance at the CUNY Graduate Center and holds degrees from Wesleyan University (BA) and CalArts (MFA & MA). Nic was recently named a Mellon Humanities Public Fellow, as part of a 3-year program dedicated to reimagining the humanities for the public good.