Rowan Pierce
Sound & Spatial Designer
Rowan is an award-winning performance designer who produces and exhibits work, across a range of mediums including live performance, music, film and visual arts.
His career spans upwards of 10 years with a substantial background in sound and live video design. These mediums continue to be at the forefront of his practice in creating performative design. Rowan has an exceptional ability to create visceral environments for performance using a multi-disciplinary approach to spatial and performance design, synthesising video, sound, light and object seamlessly to create physically affecting works.
He describes his role as a designer within the dance, theatre and wider performing arts landscape as pushing for tangible and impactful live-art experience with a drive to confront complacency within conventions of our live-performance spaces and environments. Ultimately as a means to allow performance to be not only an artform to be witnessed but to be viscerally affecting and provide heightened experiences beyond audience expectations.
Awards include PANNZ FAME Award 2023. Wellington Theatre Awards Excellence in Design and AV Design 2017/2018.
His work is firmly based in Aotearoa, New Zealand and has been widely presented internationally to critical acclaim. Recent notable works include He Huia Kaimanawa (Auckland Arts Festival,Kia Mau Festival 2023), Pōhutu (Kia Mau Festival 2019, Tempo Dance Festival 2019, Te Raukura ki Kāpiti 2022). Rowan’s work with performance collective Movement Of The Human includes MEREMERE (NZ and Australian Tours) and work in progress Belle (Movement of the Human).