George Tsypin is a sculptor, architect and designer for opera, musicals and large spectacles and installations. He has worked for many years with renowned directors and composers such as Peter Sellars, Julie Taymor, Zhang Yimou, Francesca Zambello, Pierre Audi, Jürgen Flimm, Philip Glass, John Adams, Kaija Saariaho and Andrey Konchalovsky.
His designs for opera have been produced all over the world, including at the Salzburg Festival (Saint François d’Assise, Le Grand Macabre, L’Amour de loin, West Side Story), the Paris Opéra, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, La Scala, Milan, the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. George Tsypin has worked in all major theatres in the USA, as well as in film and television. His Broadway credits as a set designer for musical theatre include Disney Theatrical’s production of The Little Mermaid and Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark (Tony Award nomination, Outer Critics Circle Award). He conceived, wrote the script for, co-directed and designed the Opening Ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, for which he was nominated for an Emmy Award in the USA.
George Tsypin has won many awards, including the International Competition of New and Spontaneous Ideas for the Theatre for Future Generations at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. His sculptures received their first one-man gallery show in 1991 at the Twining Gallery in New York. In 2002 George Tsypin was chosen to exhibit his work at the Venice Biennale. He created the Planet Earth Gallery, an installation of moving architectural elements, videos and 200 sculptures as one of England’s largest Millennium Projects. His Sea Glass Carousel, designed for a site in Battery Park next to the World Trade Center in Manhattan, opened in summer 2015. A retrospective book of his designs, George Tsypin Opera Factory: Building in the Black Void, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2005 (Golden Pen Award); the second book, George Tsypin Opera Factory: Invisible City, by the same publisher, was released in 2016.
George Tsypin’s recent works include the show Awakening — a production with a budget of 150 million dollars in Las Vegas — and the show Great China in China.
