Stephen Charles Smith is an L.A. based digital dramaturg. He applies his classical expertise in dramaturgy towards speculative performance and emergent technology. He is passionate about the synergistic benefits of prototyping and developing emergent technology through immersive storytelling.

An alumnus of the Columbia University MFA Dramaturgy program and the Columbia University School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab (DSL), Stephen contributes digital dramaturgy to the DSL, currently developing ‘Blockchain Fairytale Project’—the first virtual, NFT tabletop game.

Stephen was digital dramaturg for The Raven, an Official Selection of the 57th New York Film Festival’s Convergence Lab (2019), which highlights the best of new media. The Raven, leveraging cutting-edge AR and proof-of-concept IOT technology from Microsoft, transformed the Irish American Historical Society into an interactive space haunted by the spirit of Edgar Allen Poe.

In summer 2020, he co-created We Need Your Listening, a virtual experiment in which thirty smart tablets Zoomed a quarantined audience into one shared performance space. WNYL was recommended by New Yorker, and profiled in Hollywood Soapbox, Playbill, The New York Times and Vulture. Helen Shaw of Vulture said “How to make Zoom feel fresh again after all these months?...In facing screens at each other, like two mirrors in a mise en abyme, the team had distressed the video into something new. The feeds looked like crackly, noisy ’80s TV — which is to say, great.”

Stephen is the recent Founder & Director of Experimental Orange. Currently in development, Experimental Orange is a thirty acre orange orchard in Ojai, California, where the stunning natural landscape will be a sandbox for new media experiments.

Stephen has a B.A. in Dramatic Literature from NYU and his M.F.A. in Dramaturgy from Columbia University.

Awards: Finalist, Playwrights’ Realm Writing Fellowship, Semi-Finalist 2020 Ars Nova Play Group, Nominee for 2019/2020 Cherry Lane Mentor Project (Julia Jarcho) and Finalist 2018/2019 Bushwick Starr Reading Series

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