About the Artist

Es Devlin (London, 1971) is a British artist who conceives of an audience as a temporary society—a momentary community in which new perspectives can be explored together. Working across sculpture, performance, music, drawing, painting, language, and light, her multilayered practice creates moments in which individual experience expands into collective thought. These participatory works are often realized as large-scale installations shaped through shared acts such as choral performance, collective reading, and the accumulation of language.

An artist and stage designer who bridges artistic rigor and broad public appeal, Devlin has participated in projects with major international organizations and cultural institutions, including the United Nations, Tate Modern, the V&A Museum, Lincoln Center, Serpentine Gallery, Art Basel, Dubai Expo, and the London Olympic Closing Ceremony, as well as designing stages for world-renowned musicians.

In 2025, her installations Library of Us and Library of Light in Milan and Miami hosted daily collective reading programs, engaging over one million visitors. Her project Congregation, developed in collaboration with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), comprises fifty portrait works and is being presented at the Perelman Arts Center in New York. This project follows her Lincoln Center installation Your Voices (2022), which explored the 637 languages spoken across New York City.

In 2023, collaborating with U2, Devlin inaugurated the Sphere in Las Vegas with an installation conceived as a cathedral of Nevada’s endangered species. Earlier, in Come Home Again (2022), installed outside Tate Modern, she presented drawings of 250 of London’s endangered species, interwoven with the voices of local diasporic choirs.

Devlin was the first female architect of the UK Pavilion at the World Expo 2021, where she gathered the words of millions of visitors into an AI co-authored collective poem. Her practice also spans large-scale performances and spectacles, including the Super Bowl Halftime Show, stadium projects with internationally renowned musicians, operatic productions at the Royal Opera House and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and Olympic opening and closing ceremonies in London and Rio de Janeiro. Her installation Forest of Us, which inaugurated Superblue Miami, is a meditative environment reflecting on the symmetry between human lungs and trees and remains on permanent view. In 2018, she painted one of Trafalgar Square’s stone lions fluorescent red and invited visitors to feed it words, forming a collective poem projected onto Nelson’s Column.

In addition, Devlin has served as stage designer and visual director for performances by global artists including U2, Beyoncé, Adele, Lady Gaga, The Weeknd, and Kanye West. The stages she designs function not merely as backdrops, but as immersive narrative environments in which audiences collectively experience the work, deepening the sense of engagement and immersion.

Es Devlin has received numerous honors, including Emmy Awards, Ivor Novello Awards, three Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, the London Design Medal, the McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT, and a CBE. She is currently a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music, Fellow of Camberwell College of Arts, a Bloomberg–Oxford Fellow, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford.