BIOGRAPHY
Alex McDowell
Alex McDowell is one of the most innovative and influential designers working in narrative media, with the impact of his ideas extending far beyond his background in cinema. McDowell advocates an immersive design process that acknowledges the key world-building role of design in storytelling. McDowell trained as a painter in London in the ’70s, then opened a graphic design firm where he built his reputation designing album covers for seminal groups in the London punk scene. He moved into production design for music videos and commercials, settled in Los Angeles in the mid-’80s, and moved into film in 1990. Since then he has designed in cinema for directors as diverse as Steven Spielberg, Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton and David Fincher. With many awards for his film design work, McDowell was named Royal Designer for Industry by the UK’s most prestigious design so- ciety, the Royal Society of Arts, in 2006. He currently serves as adjunct professor at the Interactive Media Department/School of Cinematic Arts, USC, and is Visiting Artist at MIT Media Lab, where he has been working for several years with Tod Machover’s Opera of the Future Lab to develop design and visual content for Death and the Powers.