PAINTING
& SCENIC DESIGN PORTFOLIO
Welcome to Danila Korogodsky's online portfolio! Here you’ll find examples of his work in a variety of genres, techniques and expressive visual languages. It is a result of a career that spans more than four decades and became a journey through time and cultures. We hope you will find looking at those images meaningful and useful.
My work as a stage designer, director, and visual artist is a study of the human condition.
I am drawn to exploring how human beings retain their fundamental humanity amid the increasingly inhumane circumstances of today’s world.
I focus on what is eternal within us, yet I reach it by closely observing what is temporary and finite in human life. I seek traces of beauty and spirit in the most contradictory and turbulent circumstances. I create spatial machines—illusory instruments that, when engaged, generate poetic, dynamic, and unforgettable patterns of behavior.
My visual vocabulary is drawn from many sources, marrying artifacts of the past with their contemporary counterparts. Throughout, my main concern is life itself—in all its spontaneous and unpredictable glory.
I construct my work by idiosyncratically blending genres and aesthetics. Whether designing or directing, my intellect constantly strives to match the mystery of being. Paradoxically, what makes my art compelling is not only the complexity, richness, and scope of its subject, but also the fact that we often do not gain new knowledge so much as uncover and profoundly rediscover truths that are evident, obvious, and ancient.
Life’s symphonic chatter—its polyphony, its magnificent stream of sounds, movements, smells, collisions, harmonies, and dissonances—inspires me. Through the rigorous and logical process of my art, I aim to illuminate the intuitive and probe the subconscious, hoping to achieve poetic resonance.
Working in the theater invariably brings me to the epicenter of this dramatic contradiction. My tools are old; my materials precede me. Yet I am driven by the hunger to create something that exists in the heartbeat of the present. I believe that theater is poetry in motion—fully alive when suspended in the continuous now.
As an artist, I believe in the radical power of empathy. I know no better definition of my artistic mission than the words of Henry David Thoreau:
“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”
Danila Korogodsky
ABOUT DANILA KOROGODSKY
Danila Korogodsky was born into a theatrical family. His father, Zinovy Korogodsky, was a Stanislavsky Prize winner and one of the most important directors and theater pedagogues in the Soviet Union. His mother, Liah Danilina, was a playwright.
Korogodsky was raised and educated in the Soviet Union. He graduated from the Leningrad Theater Academy in 1977 as a stage and costume designer. After graduation, he worked as a resident designer at the Leningrad Theater for Young Spectators, a premier company for young audiences in the Soviet Union.
Korogodsky also worked as a freelance designer for theaters around the country, designing more than 80 productions for companies including Baku Youth Theater, Tallinn Drama Theater, Leningrad Comedy Theater, Novy Theater in Moscow, Mossovet Theater in Moscow, Ilkhom Theater in Tashkent, as well as at Taganka Theater in Moscow with Anatoly Efros.
In 1989 he was invited to design a show at Honolulu Theater for Youth in Hawaii and has continued to be a sought-after designer for productions in the United States and around the world. Since then, he has worked in the United States as a stage designer and design professor. He has designed shows for theaters all over the world: Chicago Lyric Opera, Opera Bielefeld (Germany), Opera Dessau (Germany), Opera Nantes (France), Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, Spoleto Festival USA, NYC Japan Society, Noise Within (Los Angeles), The Actors’ Gang (Los Angeles), Pittsburgh Playhouse, Minneapolis Children’s Theatre Company, ACT (San Francisco), and Wheelock Theater (Boston).
For 23 years, from 1996 to 2019, he served as a professor of set design at California State University, Long Beach, and as a resident designer at the California Repertory Company.
In 2005 he became Artistic Director of Theater Pokoleniy in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he directed and designed more than 30 productions that were critically acclaimed by the Russian and international press. His production of Sophocles’ Antigone was invited to the Chur Theater Festival in Switzerland in November 2007 as part of a program of the best new European theater.
Over the years, Theater Pokoleniy has also realized several collaborative projects supported by Goethe-Institut grants and toured extensively across Europe, presenting performances in Germany, France, Switzerland, and the Baltic countries.
In September 2017, Theater Pokoleniy’s documentary drama about the Siege of Leningrad during World War II, 67/871, was invited to perform at Theater unterm Dach in Berlin, Germany.
In 2015, for his 60th anniversary, Danila had the honor of a solo exhibit at the Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum in Moscow, Russia.
Although theater work left little time for concentrated painting, Korogodsky nevertheless managed to find moments for it. The result was a series of rare exhibitions — in Paris in 2019 and in Zurich in 2025.
Since February 2022, Korogodsky has been living in Berlin, where he has fully devoted himself to painting. By his 70th birthday, he created a new series of 19 works, which will be presented in Berlin on October 22.
