Imogen has worked professionally as a performance and event designer for the last 15 years in Sydney, Melbourne, London and Perth. Design for performance has always been her main love.
Her many skills are based in being able to take complex design briefs from initial concepts and sketches to a professionally finished product, dealing with all manufacturing processes on the way. She loves the interface between a client’s needs and the overwhelming practicalities of live performance, no matter the scale.
She trained as a production designer and theatre specialist first at U.N.E., NSW and then at W.A.A.P.A., WA, before moving to the East Coast and launching her own company ONE SMART CooKIE DESIGNS. Since 1993 she has designed and/or coordinated over 55 plays, operas, musicals, dance pieces, corporate events, short films & commercial television pieces for various projects and clients.
In 2000 Imogen joined a national Events company (Staging Connections) as their Production Designer, and worked on many of their most elaborate and spectacular productions, including the Microsoft XP launch, the Hong Kong Tourist Bureau’s tour of Australia/NZ, and many large scale conferences/ trade Expos across the country.
She left the corporate world to resume her work in theatre and film in 2002. Since then Imogen has designed costumes for original period productions in the modern recreation of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, worked extensively with glitter in the art department of the Sydney Gay Games, shot rifles & made explosives on low budget film-shoots in Bourke, developed multi-media interactive storytelling with youth theatre in Sydney’s south-western suburbs, helped to develop the 1st on-line drama course in Australia at Macquarie University, taught Performance Design at several tertiary institutions and been part of the infamous Woodford NYE Fire Ceremony team. She has been to Paris, New York and London, twice, as well as driven around Australia in a beat-up 1974 Holden Kingswood to find out what the Outback really looked like. It’s big.
In 2001 she launched her first book - Performance Design in Australia - co-authored with fellow designer, Kristen Anderson & distributed by Thames & Hudson. It provides a 25-year overview of Australian design for theatre and events. It’s the only book so far written or published in Australia on the subject.
Despite her experience in managing huge budgets, Imogen enjoys working with smaller performance companies, collaborating with artists who are vision-rich yet resource-poor.