Svitlana Kosiak: A Universe With No Borders.
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Ukrainian composer Svitlana Kosiak on her Musical Paintings, where melody merges with poetry and color,
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For Gavin Strawnato, discovery has always been part of the process. They began in botany and physics, prepared to follow a path laid out by family expectations—until a single theatre class shifted everything. What began as curiosity soon became a laboratory of light, media, and imagination, where experiments weren’t measured by data points but by how color, angle, and atmosphere could transform a stage.
Their work carries the textures of southern Appalachia, where childhood memories of catching fireflies under starlit skies now resurface as luminous installations and theatrical worlds. Just as strongly, their queerness informs a bold creative drive, aligning them with the underground art and drag pioneers who sought to shake convention.
In this edition of NEW TALENTS, we meet a designer turning experimentation into dialogue, reflection, and new ways of seeing.
I sort of tripped and landed in the arts. My parents pushed me very hard to pursue science. I was actually double-majoring in Botany and Physics when I took an intro to theatre class in my sophomore year of college. The theatre department was really the perfect storm of the mentors I needed and a student body that welcomed me. It turned out that my lifetime of insatiable curiosity worked just as well for me in making art as it did in my laboratory classes. The desire to experiment still follows me. I often create criteria or challenges for myself in a process. How can I reimagine my research style, or change my approach to angle or color for lighting? I try to make my life an artistic laboratory.
My graduate thesis was an installation based off of my childhood in Appalachia, catching fireflies. There was this evening when the trees full of lightning bugs, created a reflection of the stars and the Milky Way overhead. It’s one of my core memories and probably the first moment I felt that the universe was truly beautiful. Returning to that moment of beauty years later, after a lot of struggle and change in my personal life, was both extremely healing and pushed me into making art on my own outside of theatrical production structures.
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My childhood in southern Appalachia is something I am called to the older I get. I find little pieces of the single-wide I grew up in, or the gravel roads through the mountains, cropping up in my work more and more. I’m also extremely driven by my queerness in a political sense and thus desire to push for the liberation of all people. I love edgy, queer underground art, and a lot of my heroes are drag queens. I want to find people who want to do to American theatre what John Waters did to film.
A huge challenge I have faced is mental health and burnout. I have had a few personal life crises in the last few years, and making my own work under those conditions is really hard. Strangely, I found that digging deeper into my own experience and making my own work personal to me helped me be more available for broader collaboration.
The dream is to leave people a bit unsettled. Not uncomfortable, but compelled to think more about what they just saw. The best feeling as a viewer is needing to talk through what I just saw. My goal is always for design to feel so seamless that the audience can’t pick one element apart from the rest of the work.
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