Alex McDowell

Alex McDowell is one of the most innovative and influential designers working in the film industry today, with the impact of his ideas extending far beyond cinema. McDowell advocates an immersive design process that acknowledges the key world-building role of design in narrative media.

McDowell trained as a painter in London in the 1970s, and opened a graphic design firm in 1978 where he built his reputation designing album covers for seminal artists and groups in the London punk scene. He soon branched into production design for music videos and commercials, a move that brought him to Los Angeles in 1986. After working on hundreds of videos and commercials he moved into film in 1990. Since then he has designed for directors as diverse as Steven Spielberg and Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton and David Fincher.

With many awards for his film design work, McDowell was named Royal Designer for Industry by the UK’s most prestigious design society, the Royal Society of Arts, in 2006.

He serves on the Advisory Board for the University Art Museum at California State University Long Beach, where he is co-curator of ‘ProjectLab’, an ongoing art-science exhibition series that fuses emergent media, computer science, engineering, electronic music, and digital art production. He is also adjunct professor at the Interactive Media Department/School of Cinematic Arts, USC where he co-teaches a groundbreaking class in ‘Immersive Moviemaking’ using film as a metaphor for new creative workspace. As a visiting artist at MIT’s Media Lab, McDowell is designing the robot opera Death and the Powers, with composer Tod Machover, librettist Robert Pinsky, and director Diane Paulus.

Alex McDowell is co-director of the groundbreaking new space “5D: The Future of Immersive Design", which exists as a biennale conference, a global series of distributed events, and an expanding community of designers and practitioners in cross-media, transmedia narrative world building.

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