La Séance was an immersive murder mystery experience set in the 1930’s. Featuring live musical moments, characters created for the guests, a medium to investigate, brunch the next day and a dash of black magic, La Séance took guests on a dark and mysterious journey through a historical castle in the Hollywood Hills during the Halloween season of 2023.
A big component of this murder mystery experience was its high immersive nature: guests were dressed in era-appropriate clothing, ate and drank with characters and existed as their own characters within the world of La Séance for an entire evening. With side missions, investigations and secrets to uncover, guests came together for a seance, which resulted in a murder to solve.
With information and pieces already collected throughout the night, guests had to work together to figure out who among them was the murderer, what their motive was and what they used as the weapon. La Séance allowed guests to live within a world inspired by the movie Clue, if Clue had been centered around a seance, a medium and complicated family ties to a historical Hollywood castle.
At the end of the night, guests had their moment to shine, coming together to present their accusations. They confronted characters they thought were guilty, heard their defense and watched the truth unfold before them. The night ended with a murderer arrested, a death avenged and the truth revealed, leaving guests to celebrate their ha d work and intelligent sleuthing with drinks, taking in the views of Los Angeles from various areas of the castle.
As the co-creator & director of La Séance, I created the structure of the experience’s flow along with creating the structure for the guests’ varied experiences, created the game structure for solving the mystery, wrote the script and helped cast the show. I co-choreographed the dance and musical moments, oversaw the flow and direction of the experience as a whole and worked with the entire cast on the improvisation techniques needed for an experience with long-duration immersion.
On the marketing side, I oversaw the brand development and managed branding across all touch points, alongside social media strategy and execution.
A Love Story was set in 1950’s Los Angeles, with a narrative inspired by West Side Story and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Featuring musical numbers, characters created for the guests, a penthouse to explore, brunch the next day with a second mystery and a dash of magic, A Love Story took guests on a whimsical and nostalgic journey, ending with a scavenger hunt mystery game at a 1950’s sock-hop, complete with a live swing band and surprise dance numbers.
A big component of this overnight experience was its high immersive nature: guests were dressed in era-appropriate clothing, ate and drank with characters and interacted with them, belonging to the same world for an entire evening (and into the next day for overnight guests). With A Love Story, we took The Hotel Who immersion further, by giving guests their own characters with side missions to complete while they were in the experience.
Guests began the night in different areas of the hotel. coming together for a dinner packed with family drama, awkward introductions and surprising encounters. Once dinner finished, the party found themselves at the groom-to-be’s family penthouse, where strange happenings, side missions and unexpected secrets came to light.Just when the party seemed to be in full swing, the groom-to-be mysteriously drinks a love potion, causing the anger, heartbreak and tears.
To reverse the effects of the love potion and restore the bride and groom’s love back to what it was, guests were swept away to the only place where they could find a love potion antidote: the underworld of lust. Within the underworld of lust (a 1950’s sock-hop) guests embarked on a mystery scavenger hunt game to collect the antidote ingredients and competed against each other to break the love spell before the clock struck twelve.
As the co-creator and director of A Love Story, I created the structure of the experience’s flow along with creating the structure for the guests’ varied experiences, created the game structure for solving the mystery, wrote the script and helped cast the show. I co-choreographed the dance and musical theater moments, oversaw the flow and direction of the experience as a whole and worked with the entire cast on the improvisation techniques needed for an experience with long-duration immersion.
On the marketing side, I oversaw the brand development and managed branding across all touch points.
The Hotel Who was an overnight immersive murder mystery experience in one of Los Angeles’ historical hotels, Hotel Normandie. The experience was set in 1920’s Los Angeles and inspired by true events and people who frequented the Hotel Normandie. With 10 actors, a cocktail hour, 4-course dinner, 13 hotel rooms to explore and brunch the next day, guests of The Hotel Who lived within its world for 16 hours.
A big component of this overnight experience was it’s high immersive nature: guests were dressed in era-appropriate clothing, ate and drank with characters and interacted with them, belonging to the same world, which allowed them to step out of their everyday lives and become someone else for the night.
The Hotel Who mixed elements of dance theater, immersive theater, experiential dining and a game of sleuthing to create a one-of-a-kind experience for the denizens of Los Angeles during it’s Halloween season of 2022.
As the co-creator of The Hotel Who, I created the structure of the experience’s flow along with creating the structure for the guests’ varied experiences, created the game structure for solving the mystery, wrote the script and helped cast the show. I co-choreographed the dance theater moments, oversaw the flow and direction of the experience and worked with the entire cast on the improvisation techniques needed for an experience with long-duration immersion.
On the marketing side, I oversaw the brand development and managed branding across all touch points.
In 2019, I began working with Tyra Banks on her revolutionary experience ModelLand. As the VP of Culinary & Retail Experience and a key creative consultant, I built out five unique immersive dining concepts which would be housed in the event space’s five-thousand foot floor plan.
Expanding beyond the culinary side of ModelLand, I helped create multiple diverse immersive retail concepts, which would help develop the brand behind Tyra’s vision and bring the attraction to life via deep world building.
On site, I acted as a creative consultant and choreographer, managing art direction, graphic design for our launch campaigns while directing the experience’s cast around updated script and choreography I created.
As Executive Producer of the Chromatic Dinner Tour, I was responsible for the overall production and direction of adapting this one-of-a-kind dinner experience across multiple stops from Dubai to Los Angeles and beyond.
In partnership with the chef, I also acted as the host for each edition, guiding guests through the event.
The Chromatic Dinner was first developed in Amsterdam and went on to tour internationally across the United States, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Tour Dates
Dubai, March 2019: Art Week & Dutch Consulate dining experience in collaboration with INKED, representing and showcasing Dutch design and art
Seattle, February 2019: IXDA (The Interactive Design Association)
Beijing, September 2018: Beijing Design Week winner of Food & Innovation prize
Seattle, September 2018: Seattle Design Week
Rotterdam, July 2018: Het Nieuwe Instituut Dutch Design showcase
Los Angeles, June 2018: LA Design Festival
As producer, creative consultant, and host of Endor-Fine Dining, I worked with fashion designer Schueller de Waal and food designer Haagse Hapjes on guaranteeing their project worked harmoniously with the guidelines set forth by the artistic program. This work included leading the team through their artistic process, managing budget, and production of the project.
About Endor-Fine Dining
Endorphins contribute to a happy feeling and are released when eating spicy food, exercise, laughter and sex. Throughout this dinner, these triggers will be explored and activated, helping you to get your endorphin levels back on track.
For this dinner, Philipp Schueller and Rens de Waal put their light-hearted tongue-in-cheek attitude towards the oversaturated fashion business into play. The urgent need for new structures and values are an aspiration that both the food- and fashion industry share. Endor-Fine Dining humorously suggests alternative ways of consuming conscious recipes; with the main focus on evoking happiness alongside a healthy nutrition. For this dinner, together with Haagse Hapjes, they designed a 6-course dinner that plays with excitement, laughter, togetherness and meditative healing.
As lead producer of the Abundance Dinner, presented by artist Arne Hendricks and Chef Thorwald Voss, I ensured their project worked in partnership with the guidelines set forth by the artistic program. This work included leading the team through the artistic process, managing budgets, and end-to-end production.
About the Abundance Dinner
Growth and shrinking
When it comes to food, we often crave for more. However, when you reach a state of affluence, it is not always easy to truly celebrate abundance. How can you still be happy with something that you have plenty of? For artist Arne Hendriks, this year's cabbage surplus raises one clear question: how to deal with abundance?
Surplus, Value and waste
It was a good year for white cabbage. In fact, the affluent cabbage harvest was too much for farmers to process for a fair price. Our current economic system has turned this perfectly eatable and nourishing foods into worthless surplus. The costs to harvest cabbage cannot compete with the low prices demanded by the market. Is it also possible to add value in a different way? During this dinner we celebrate 'worthless' white cabbage and re-instate and determine its value together.
As a part of the Neo-Futurist Dinner Series at Mediamatic Amsterdam, I was responsible for the production, direction, and execution of The Chromatic Dinner, presented by Martin Butler.
About the Chromatic Dinner
Inspired by the ideas of Kandinskys's principles of Klangfarben, and the influence of the Chinese five elements: Tree, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water, each course is created in accordance to the colour and underlaying principles of each element. Each course is designed in a different color, taste, smell, texture, and sound to create a five-course chromatic dining experience.
The project's research stems from studies in Synesthesia, a perceptual condition in which the stimulation of one sense triggers an automatic, involuntary experience in another sense. The project asks the question if colour can create emotion, can that emotion and colour be enhanced by combining it with other senses. Part of the ongoing investigation is to see how a combination of these senses can create different emotional and social response from the guests through the course of the evening and heighten the gastronomic experience.
Each course has its own soundtrack inspired by Newton's circle of sound and colour (1704). Working together with the Centre for Art and Olfaction, Butler and Gershberg create each dish based upon smells that are associated with that colour. The surroundings and clothing of the waiters also change per course.
The chromatic dinner is a monochromatic, audio, visual, olfactory and culinary experience which plays with all the senses.
During my time at arts, design, and science institution Mediamatic, I was responsible for curating our annual selection of artistic teams. This process involved managing creative process and artistic guidelines while producing and hosting a four-night showcase of artists’ dining concepts.
About the Neo-Futurist Dining Series
The Neo-Futurist Dining Series is an ongoing event where an artist or designer and chef team are challenged to create a dining experience of the future, inspired by Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook.
A.C.I.D is immersive dance theater. A performance, adapted to different sites and rooms, where the audience are part of the performer’s reality. In traditional theater, an invisible barrier called the fourth wall exists to separate the performers from the public. As the audience is led through a building’s different spaces, this fourth wall is blurred — along with the boundary between reality and fiction.
A.C.I.D is based and inspired by a philosophical concept used by existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to describe the phenomenon where human beings under pressure from social forces adopt false values and disown their innate freedom and act without authenticity.
A significant feature in my work is the tendency to dedicate all projects to a type of social experiment, integrating the audience as part of the performance.
The project is an implementation and result of the Artistic Residency at EHBK/ OT301 Amsterdam, February - June 2017
The Lowlands Light Project is an experimental, multidisciplinary installation. The performance, which explored the relationship between movement and light, asked audiences to choose the sequence of the show’s four sections via light installations.
The Lowlands Light Project was made possible by DCR guest studios, CLOUD Danslab, and DalioArts.
Flow State explored the manner in which artists in a state of flow experience effortless control.
During Flow State, musicians and dancers were asked to improvise in order to reach a state of flow. Audiences were welcome to sit, stand, or walk through the space in order to witness artists achieving a state of flow.
Flow State was shown at the Emerson Dorsch Gallery in Miami.
Pattern state is a site-specific installation and performance chosen by the city of Miami for The Fringe Festival and Art Dayz.
Six teams were chosen and curated by Amanda Sanfilippo in order to create site specific pieces which would bring more awareness to the arts.
Move Me is an installation which challenges audiences to decide the outcome of the performance via two dancers and a drum which controls their movement.
Move Me is an experiment that explores pack mentality and our willingness to follow the actions of others.