Clifton Chadick
I am a Arizona-based scenic designer and creative director with a passion for designing evocative environments that spark curiosity, stir emotions, and ignite creativity.
For me, theater has always been a vital outlet for self-expression and emotional exploration. As a child I’d act out my favorite fairy tales for my family utilizing our garage door as the grand drape and a rusted-out trailer serving as the stage. My grandfather was a NASA engineer and an amateur magician, so I was exposed to the art of illusion and the engineering behind the magic at an early age. It was this marriage of storytelling and technical skill that really ignited my passion for scenic design.
Over the past decade, I have cultivated my own unique style, which foregrounds the emotional landscape of a play. For ‘Only You Can Prevent Wildfires’, I placed the audience inside a burnt-out theater that was simultaneously a decimated national park. For Grant Varjas’s new play, Accidentally Like A Martyr, set in a West Village gay bar, I gave the audience a voyeuristic perspective by positioning them behind the barback mirror, which acted as the 4th wall. For my bare-bones production of 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory' I spent a large portion of the production's resources creating an edible landscape of oversized candy flowers to elicit an awe-inspiring sense of wonderment, which received nightly applause upon its reveal.