Biography

Clyde Sheets is a lighting and scenic designer, musician and educator. His designs have been seen in works for theatre, ballet, opera, musical theatre and contemporary dance. He has taught dance lighting and production at Mills College in Oakland, CA., and was the Production Manager and Lecturer for the San Francisco State University Department of Theater Arts.

Clyde’s design work earned him an Isadora Duncan Dance Award in 2006 for the lighting and scenic design of Deborah Slater Dance Theatre’s Hotel of Memories at CounterPulse in San Francisco. His lighting design for Lizz Roman and Dancers Blue Floor Reflections was accepted by the USITT Emerge exhibit for the Prague Quadrennial in 2011. He was also a participating lighting designer at the Quadrennial. He graduated with honors with an MFA in Design and Production from San Francisco State.

As a founding member of The Mad Dog Theater, the groundbreaking San Francisco band, he wrote and performed original rock musicals, winning back-to-back Whammie Awards from the SF Weekly in 1990 and 1991. Clyde can still be seen singing with MDT alum R. Gimbo. He is also a DJ, creating sound scores for modern dance concerts with cellist Alex Kelly and DJ/Beat Master Jerome Lindner.

Clyde brings emotional perception, musical rhythm, and theatrical craft together to get to the heart of the collaboration between designer and artist, artist and audience. His approach has fostered many long-term artistic relationships and years of beautifully perceptive work.