BIOGRAPHY
Artist-in-residence program, NYSS in DUMBO 2025
Originally from the UK, Narelle Sissons lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and New Canaan, Connecticut. An award-winning designer for theatre and opera, her work has taken her across the United States and internationally since graduating from the Royal College of Art (MA, 1991) and Central Saint Martins (BA, 1998) in London. She was a Professor of Design in the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University for fifteen years. Her professional credits include exhibiting three times at the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, serving as a Fulbright Specialist, and receiving Drama Desk Award and two Helen Hayes Award nominations.
Alongside her career in performance design, Sissons earned an MFA in Painting from the New York Studio School in 2024. In 2025, she completed the New York Studio School Artist Residency in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Her residency culminated in the solo exhibition Not Just AnyBody at the NYSS Project Space. During the residency, she also curated UnBind: Figuring the Layers of Being, a group exhibition featuring New York artists. Both exhibitions were reviewed in Art Spiel and amNewYork.
Her paintings have been exhibited widely in New York and Connecticut. In New York City, her work was included in Being Human at The Painting Center (2024), Stories Unfolding at Art Gotham (2025), and the Bowery Gallery's 34th Annual Juried Exhibition (2025). In Connecticut, she has exhibited in Color Me, the 72nd A•ONE, and the 74th A•ONE exhibitions at Silvermine Galleries, where she received the Grand Prize in 2024. Her work has also been shown at the Bendheim Gallery in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Sissons is the recipient of the 2025 Mercedes Matter Award. In 2026, she presented the solo exhibition Under Wraps at Silvermine Galleries.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, she co-created an online painting course for refugee women in the Houston area in partnership with WRAP.
INSTAGRAM: @narellesissons
CONTACT: narellesissonsdesign@gmail.com
TheatricalRepresentation:
Russ Rosensweig, Agent
Summit Entertainment Group
10 Potter Hill Drive
Guilford, CT 06437
russ@summitentertainmentgroup.com