GABRIEL HAINER EVANSOHN

Partner, Co-Founder, and Lead Designer

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 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.

Recently with IBCP, Gabriel co-conceived, and was the production designer of KPOP (Ars Nova, Woodshed Collective and Ma-Yi Theater Company), a huge immersive musical about a Korean pop label’s invasion into America. Installed over 3 theaters and connecting spaces, audiences followed a three-track journey culminating in a pop concert. "A delicious spectacle...expansive, catchy,and cunning. An outwardly flashy, deceptively shrewd investigation-cum-celebration of the peppy, glamorous, multi-billion-dollar musical genre." - Sara Holdren, New York (Vulture). "Gabriel Hainer Evansohn’s sets are marvels of manicured kitsch." - Ben Brantley, The New York Times. "Undoubtedly the most ambitious off-broadway musical of the year!" - Zachary Stewart, theatermania.com. "The production/scenic design, by Gabriel Hainer Evansohn, is a marvel of layout and planning, not to mention crowd control..." - David Barbour, Lighting and Sound America

He was also, with partner William Irons, the production manager of Sweeney Todd at Barrow Street, as well as the associate scenic designer.Winner- Lucille Lortel Award Outstanding Revival 2017 and called "A wondrous production" by the The New Yorker.

Previously, with Woodshed, Gabriel 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, "one feels less like a spectator and more like an inhabitant of a beautifully dilapidated old building whose tenants are all different degrees of crazy." - L Magazine, "Gabriel Hainer Evansohn, has worked wonders" - New York Times, "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); Does It Hurt When I Do This in a 400-year-old Customs House by the South Street Seaport; and 12 Ophelias, set in the empty McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn ("Beautiful", The New Yorker, "A deconstructed masterstroke", New York Press).

Outside of Woodshed, he was Production Manager for Variety Worldwide leading the renovation of the storied venue, The Diamond Horseshoe and managing the build and installation of their immersive, circus, dinner performance event, The Queen of the Night (2014), at the Paramount Hotel in NYC, directed by Christine Jones.  He was also the production designer and manager of an immersive workshop of Better for Night, (2015) produced by Randy Weiner, directed by Teddy Bergman and choreographed by Ani Neimann

He has designed and managed events and performance for corporate clients such as AMC, Bloomberg L.P., and "The Black Label Bacon Strip Show" for Black Label Bacon at the Marquee Nightclub in Las Vegas. He has done design and management at festivals including Outside Lands, Bonnaroo, Clusterfest, and Lost Lake. His installation and designs have been seen at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (Experiment America 2012), and at many various theaters and schools throughout NYC, including the 3LD, 59e59, Incubator Arts Project, Ars Nova, Theater Row, Playwrights Horizons Theater School, Barnard College, and Atlantic Theater Company and Acting School where he worked for 5 years as a production manager and resident scenic and lighting designer. He is an experienced carpenter, electrician and special effects technician, and has been a production manager and a technical director at venues throughout NY.

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