I’m a writer, theater designer, and MDes student at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. My theoretical, critical, and design work explores phenomenologies of time, focusing on our experience of time as rendered sensible through architecture, art, and performance. I study queer temporality and the unstable, impermanent, and contested edges of memory as mediated by materiality. My related interests include Marxist and feminist literary theory, biopolitics, and the ordinary.

I’m a contributor to the futureStage project at metaLAB, and prior to the GSD, I worked in New York City as a scenic and lighting designer for theater and live performance. My work includes productions at Off-Broadway and indie theaters including Pershing Square Signature Center, Theater Row, American Theater of Actors, The Tank, Theater for the New City, Under St. Marks, The Brick, and more.

I graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University with a concentration in Anthropology and a certificate in Theater. My undergraduate research explored the literary and cultural history of American nostalgia with particular attention towards material objects, and in recognition for my design work, I was awarded the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts.

Resume and portfolio available upon request.

︎ hello@wfcornwell.com

Some books I’ve been reading lately:

• Meeting the Universe Halfway by Karen Barad
• Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Bioplitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era by Paul Preciado
  
• Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories by Elizabeth Freeman
  
• The Materiality of Architecture by Antoine Picon
• The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam
• Artificial Darkness by Noam Elcott
• A Short History of the Shadow by Victor Stoichita
• Parasite by Michel Serres