James V. Ogden is Associate Director of the School of Theatre and Dance, Assistant Professor of Theatre: Scenic Design, and Curator of the Charles Lisanby Archive at JMU’s Madison Art Collection. He has spent nearly twenty years working as a scenic designer, technical director, production manager, and educator. He holds a BFA in Scenic Design and Production from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA in Theatrical Design from the University of Texas at Austin.

His professional designs include Angels in America, Parts 1 and 2 (2018 Suzi Bass Award for Best Production), Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1, 2 & 3, Falsettos, and The Brothers Size at Actor’s Express in Atlanta; Sweat at the Warehouse Theatre in Greenville, SC; A Distinct Society at Richmond’s Firehouse Theatre; and The America Play and Circle Machine with Oracle Productions in Chicago. Earlier in his career he built models for designers Scott Bradley, Brian Sidney Bembridge, and Richard Isackes for productions at the Guthrie, Arena Stage, Berkeley Rep, and the Goodman, and for the Prague Quadrennial. Slip River, which he designed at UT Austin, won the Austin Critics’ Table Award for Best Production–Comedy.

At JMU he has designed Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, The Play That Goes Wrong, Rewritten, Pippin, Basement Demons and Trailer Saints, and JMU Opera’s Dialogues of the Carmelites. He teaches Design Aspects, Scenic Design, Drafting for the Stage, and Scenic Painting. Before JMU he was Senior Lecturer and Technical Director at Mercer University and Department Chair at Wesleyan College, where he helped build an interdisciplinary Arts Management major.

His essay “Not Just a Chair: Considering Design Choices” (HowlRound) looks at how even a single chair onstage shapes character. One of his scenic models inspired Raven Monroe’s monologue “On Apocalypses” in Prompt: A Journal of Theatre Theory, Practice, and Teaching. He has presented at USITT on experimental approaches to scenic design and on 3D printing and laser cutting, and he keeps exploring props, puppetry, projection, and new fabrication tools. As curator, he is reorganizing Lisanby’s drawings, drafting, and correspondence around the productions Lisanby designed.

Website: jamesvogden.com