Rate My Professor Tanja Beer

Dr. Tanja Beer is an Associate Professor in Design at the Queensland College of Art and Design, Griffith University, Australia. Holding a PhD in Ecoscenography from the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne, a Masters in Stage Design from Kunst Universität Graz (KUG) in Austria, and a Graduate Diploma in Performance Making from the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) in Australia, she brings over 25 years of professional experience to her role. Beer has designed more than 70 productions for prestigious institutions including the Sydney Opera House, Melbourne Theatre Company, Queensland Theatre Company, Melbourne International Arts Festival, and international venues in New York, London, Cardiff, Glasgow, and Vienna. Her career spans practice and academia, with 10 years of tertiary teaching in subjects such as scenography, performance making, sustainable production, spatial design, architecture, landscape architecture, design research, ecological design, and climate change across universities in Australia and abroad. Recently promoted to Associate Professor, she teaches across interior and spatial design disciplines and serves as co-director of the Performance + Ecology Research Lab at Griffith University.

Beer's research centers on ecoscenography, a pioneering concept she coined in 2012 that integrates ecological principles into all stages of scenographic thinking and production for performance. She is the author of the book Ecoscenography: An Ecological Design Practice for Performance (Springer, 2021) and has published key works including 'The Living Stage: A case study in ecoscenography' (2015), 'Ecomaterialism in scenography' (2016), and 'Exploring integrated ArtScience experiences to foster nature connectedness through head, heart and hand' (2022). Her acclaimed project, The Living Stage—a recyclable, biodegradable, and edible performance space combining stage design, permaculture, and community engagement—has been realized in locations such as Castlemaine, Cardiff, Glasgow, Armidale, Lorne, New York, and Melbourne. Beer's work has been selected for the 2019 Prague Quadrennial and the 2015 British contingent at the Prague Quadrennial, exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She has received awards including an Asialink Residency with the Tokyo Institute of Technology and a Norman Macgeorge Scholarship with the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and Julie’s Bicycle. In 2024, she secured an ARC Linkage grant for an eco-arts project and an Institute of Advanced Studies Fellowship Award for 2025. Her contributions have garnered global recognition for advancing sustainability in the performing arts.