DWIGHT BELLISIMO

Dwight Bellisimo is a proud San Francisco native and projection designer, currently an MFA candidate at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, where he continues to develop a practice built on a simple but radical idea: projection design is the crossroad where every other discipline converges. Film, music, light, scenery, sound, photography all exist simultaneously in this work. That convergence is what drew him in, and it is what keeps him there.

It started at Tamalpais High School, where drama teacher Ben Cleveland pulled a star athlete toward the stage and never let him leave. The Conservatory Theatre Ensemble, one of the most rigorous high school theatre programs in the country, trained Dwight across every discipline: acting, directing, lighting, sound, design. That total immersion gave him something most designers don't have: a deep, lived understanding of every other person in the room.

Fluent across theatre's disciplines including lighting, sound, directing, and acting, Dwight understands projection design as the most collaborative role on any production, because it demands that you tune into every other element in the room. He is not interested in filling in scenery. He wants to breathe life into an experience, to show the audience the emotional subtext of what the actors cannot say aloud. There is a careful game at play: give too much away and you explain everything; hold back just enough and the audience makes the connections themselves. He embraces that balance, and he embraces the mystery that still surrounds the discipline. What projections can do, how far they can reach, remains genuinely open. Mystery, he believes, is an invitation.

His work spans Yale Repertory Theatre, Yale Cabaret, Lookingglass Theater, Timeline Theatre Company, Greenhouse Theater, and Northwestern University, among others. He holds a BFA in Projection Design from The Theater School at DePaul University, where he received the award for Best Projection Design for A Wrinkle in Time. There is nothing more innately human, he says, than a group of storytellers interacting in real time, and integrating projections into that ancient act is what adds joy and purpose to his life. Under his musical moniker Dwizzle D, he extends that same instinct into live performance, merging eccentric visuals with experimental music to create experiences that resist easy categorization.