2025 Resident artist
Alexander Berlage

SCO is proud to announce director and lighting designer
Alexander Berlage as 2025 Resident Artist.

Alexander started work with SCO in 2015 as a lighting associate on An Index of Metals. Alexander flawlessly realised a lighting design of immense complexity for this Kip Williams show. SCO then engaged Alexander as (lead) lighting designer for our 2016 Sydney Biennale production of Victory Over the Sun, creating a site-specific art performance/installation. His work on this gave him entry into making work for visual arts events/galleries, culminating recently in being Creative Director for the MCA Artist Ball. In 2018, SCO engaged Alexander for his first opera directing job with a solo show, The Shape of the Earth.

His skill in both directing and lighting inspired SCO to use Alexander in these two roles on an increasingly ambitious basis. He directed SCO’s 2020 Diary of One Who Disappeared for the Sydney Opera House’s digital series, which grew into a live presentation in 2021 Sydney Festival, Future Remains. In 2022, he lit the international co-presentation of Antarctica in the Holland Festival and Awakening Shadow at Carriageworks. After creating a stunning mise-en-espace for the Art Gallery of NSW in January for Cloud Music, Alexander will now direct and light Muhly’s Aphrodite. Over a period of ten years, SCO has sustained and supported the career of this major NSW artist and deepened his skills and collaborations across two theatrical disciplines.

The Diary of One Who Disappeared, Image by Craig Wall