NEW HAVEN, CONN.: The Burry Fredrik Foundation has named projection designer Camilla Tassi the recipient of this year’s Burry Fredrik Design Fellowship. Tassi will receive a $25,000 award.
“The design fellowship perfectly epitomizes Burry Fredrik’s lifelong commitment to theatre, to design, and to helping young professionals in the field,” Barbara Pearce said in a statement on behalf of the foundation named for the producer, stage manager, and director, who died in 2012. “We know she would be delighted by the selection of Camilla Tassi as this year’s recipient.”
Established in 2017 to help launch the careers of graduates from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University’s design departments, the fellowship has the faculty select one graduating scenic, costume, lighting, projection, or sound designer each year. In addition to the cash award, if the fellow is hired as a designer at any professional theatre in Connecticut in the following two years, the foundation will make a grant to that theatre in an amount equal to the fee paid to the designer.
Tassi is a projection and video designer, producer, and musician from Florence, Italy. In addition to academic credits, her work has been seen at Baltimore Center Stage, Long Wharf Theatre, the Prototype Festival, MASS MoCA, the Berlin Opera Academy, Apollo’s Fire, and the Bloomington Chamber Singers, among others. She has also designed, filmed, and edited programs for the Washington Chorus, the Princeton Festival, and Chicago’s Ear Taxi Festival, among others. Through support from the TSAI Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale, Tassi founded a collective for educational and performance collaboration between theatrical designers and chamber musicians. She is currently pursuing her MFA in projection design at Yale, where she translates Italian libretti and sings with the Schola Cantorum.
“It is humbling to receive this award, and I look forward to ways of giving back and meeting new collaborators within the Connecticut theatre community,” Tassi said in a statement. “As someone who grew up outside of the U.S., I care about developing roots and deeper relationships. I am moved that engagement with the state’s arts community is at the center of the Burry Fredrik Foundation’s mission.”
Burry Fredrik established the foundation in her name to promote the development of new work and the fiscal health of professional theatres in Connecticut and to foster the development of young theatre designers.
