Doug Fitch

Doug Fitch (born August 2, 1959) is a polymath American visual artist and director.

He is most well known for his opera productions, but his body of work spans multiple media, from drawing and sculpture to theater, architecture, and food.

Fitch is the co-founder of the theatre and entertainment company Giants Are Small, together with Swiss producer and filmmaker Edouard Getaz, and multimedia entrepreneur Frederic Gumy.

He is also the co-founder of the collaborative art partnership known as Orphicorps with Mimi Oka, known for using edible media in experimental feasts.

During his career as a director, Fitch has created productions for the Los Angeles Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Santa Fe Opera, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, and several other major arts institutions.

Fitch has collaborated with James Levine, Alan Gilbert, Leonard Slatkin, Peter Sellars, Robert Wilson, Karole Armitage, Joshua Bell, and other artists.

He has also worked with puppeteer Jim Henson (The Muppets, Sesame Street), and the architect/designer Gaetano Pesce.

Doug Fitch was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

He then grew up in Fargo, North Dakota and Coventry, Connecticut.

As a youth, he studied violin, dance and puppetry.

Early on, he was involved with community theater and eventually, with his brother the artist Chris Fitch, turned the family basement into a theater to perform original works based on Shakespeare tragedies and musical comedies.

Later, after attending an introduction to puppetry arts course at the University of Connecticut at age nine, he worked with his family to create a touring puppet theatre.

Fitch studied at Harvard University, where he graduated summa cum laude in Visual Studies.

During those years, Fitch performed in various musical theater productions including the Hasty Pudding Theatricals.

He also collaborated with director Peter Sellars on several theatrical enterprises, including a puppet version of Wagner's Ring cycle in the streets of Denver Colorado.

For another Sellars project – a well-known production of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, staged in the Adams House Swimming Pool at Harvard, Fitch played the part of the Clown.

In 1979–1980 Fitch took a year off from Harvard to study cooking at La Varenne in Paris, and architectural design at l’Institut d’Architecture et d’Etudes Urbaines in Strasbourg, France.

At the latter, he met Italian architect and designer Gaetano Pesce, who became an important influence on his work.

Fitch worked with Pesce for the next three years in Venice, making models of visionary buildings and contributing to international design competitions.

In the late 1980s, Fitch emerged as an architectural designer.

He designed several houses, interiors, and pieces of furniture.

In 1986, with collaborator Ross Miller, he designed the home of art dealer/collector Meredyth Moses.

First published in the Boston Globe, it was revisited by Metropolis ten years later.

Fitch continued to design private residences and in 1989, he also co-founded Ooloo, a company specializing in one-of-a-kind art furniture that he made with artisans in the Philippines.

Ooloo furniture was featured in galleries in the US, Europe, and Japan.

The company also produced products for the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, Barney's, Henry Bendell, and many other institutions.

His time in the Philippines led to an assignment by the government there to become the 1997 International Design Consultant for Gifts and Housewares exports.

An article appeared about this work in Metropolis.

Meanwhile, Fitch continued to work in the theater, mainly as a set designer for the Seattle Repertory Theater.

He also wrote, directed, and designed a series of experimental shows in the Boston area, including The Potluck Supper, The Sweating Fire Alarm, and The Sweating Door Alarm.

A chance meeting with Mimi Oka led to the creation of Orphicorps and a series of Orphic Feasts that eventually culminated in a French-English bilingual book called Orphic Fodder

Upon his return to the US Fitch moved to New York, where together with Oka, he created two major events with the Asia Society, the Edible Still Life in Clay and Good Taste in Art.

Many other events followed in Japan, France, New York, Santa Fe, Portugal, and the Czech Republic.

In 1999, Alan Gilbert hired Fitch to design and construct the interior of his New York apartment.

This led to an ongoing series of music-based projects with Gilbert.

Fitch also designed an innovative interior for violinist Joshua Bell's home.

A New York Times article published in 2003 about Fitch's design caught the attention of Uli Bader, then the artistic director of the National Symphony Orchestra, who invited Fitch to create a series of concert theatre productions at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC: L'enfant et les sortilèges, Swan Lake, and The Abduction from the Seraglio.

Fitch's collaboration with agent Linde Trottenberg, founder of Multi Art International, led to several art exhibitions and installations all over in Germany.

The first of these was entitled Organs of Emotion and was held in the Center for Epileptic Research in Bonn.

The entire show of drawings was purchased by a pharmaceutical company and toured throughout Germany.