Design in a Frame of Emotion

Design in a Frame of Emotion
Hannah Beachler with Jacqueline Stewart and Toni L. Griffin

Hannah Beachler is known as an award-winning production designer, but she tells the audience that she considers herself to be more of a story designer. As film stills and concept art from a few of those stories—Moonlight, Miles Ahead, Creed, Lemonade, and Black Panther—flash across a screen, Beachler engages in a conversation with Jacqueline Stewart and Toni L. Griffin about set building and curation, urban design, location scouting, Afrofuturism, fictional histories, and Black feminist narratives, and elucidates her role: a designer behind on-screen tableaux that provide not only visual feasts of artistry and imagination but also intimate spaces of emotion, humanity, and constructed memory.

Design in a Frame of Emotion is the eighth title in The Incidents, a book series based on events at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Designed by ELLA.

Softcover, 68 pages, 11.5 x 17.9 cm
$18.00 / €14.00 / $24.00 CAN
ISBN 978-3-95679-559-6

Copublished by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Sternberg Press, Spring 2020.

HANNAH BEACHLER is a prolific production designer who crafts unique emotional landscapes for every story she designs. She made history as the first African American to be nominated for an Academy Award in Production Design, which she won in 2019 for her work on Marvel’s Black Panther (2018), directed by her frequent collaborator Ryan Coogler. She previously worked with Coogler on Creed (2015) and Fruitvale Station (2013), and with the director Barry Jenkins on the 2017 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, Moonlight (2016). She also worked on visuals for Beyoncé’s 2018 OTR II tour, as well as on her visual concept album Lemonade (2016), which earned Beachler the 2017 Art Directors Guild Award for Excellence in Production Design and a 2016 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Production Design.

JACQUELINE STEWART is professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, and directs the South Side Home Movie Project and the Cinema 53 screening and discussion series. She is also director of Arts + Public Life at the University of Chicago and the host of Silent Sunday Nights on Turner Classic Movies.