About Akhila Krishnan
(she/her) – Hastings, East Sussex, UK – Creative Director and Designer. Hosted by the RSC.
Akhila Krishnan is a creative director and designer working at the forefront of technology and visual storytelling today. She has over 15 years of experience working internationally in live performance & events, theatre, opera, projection mapping, installation, exhibition, virtual reality, augmented reality, television, live broadcast, short film, illustration, and graphic narrative. Akhila is interested in the possibilities that technology offers to take narrative and storytelling beyond the screen, bringing it into lived spaces via shared experiences. Her practice moves between the material and immaterial, between the digital and tactile – seeking new connections and resonances between them.
Her work has recently been nominated at the Drama Desk Awards, International Opera Awards, the Novellos, What’s on Stage Awards and Broadway World UK awards. Over the course of her career, she has also received several other honors including the Inlaks Shivadasani Scholarship, Man Group Drawing Prize and the IDPA Silver Prize.
During her time at 59 Productions, she was a core part of the Tony and Olivier Award winning design team that worked on the musical An American in Paris. She was also Senior Designer on Grenfell: Our Home, Channel 4’s first VR documentary, that won awards at the Sheffield and Raindance Film Festival.
Akhila graduated from the Royal College of Art, receiving a distinction for her MA thesis. She received her BA from the National Institute of Design in India, during which time she was an exchange student at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris.