Leah Mazur is a multidisciplinary scenographer and visual artist whose practice moves between performance design, installation, painting, drawing, and ceramics. Across these forms, her work examines the relationship between body and space—asking how identity, memory, trauma, and lived experience become embedded within the environments and objects we inhabit.
At the center of Mazur’s scenographic practice is an investigation of space as witness: how environments hold memory, accumulate evidence, and shape the ways bodies are seen, understood, and remembered. Her work considers space not simply as a container for performance, but as an active participant in it—one capable of revealing, concealing, and transforming the histories carried by the bodies that move through it. This inquiry extends into her visual art practice, where the focus shifts from the space surrounding the body to the body itself. Through painting, drawing, ceramics, and installation, she studies the corporeal dynamics of trauma and identity, using scale, proximity, surface, and material to examine the body as both physical matter and embodied experience.
Her research explores the boundaries between experiencing and becoming performance, with particular interest in interactive installation, performance art, and the intersections of physical and digital space. Her work frequently centers new and emerging performance, foregrounding femme voices and cultivating collaborative processes with women, femme, trans, and non-binary artists.
An active designer with a national and international practice, Mazur’s work has been produced and exhibited across the United States and internationally. Select credits include Dallas Theater Center, Amphibian Stage, Undermain Theatre, Stage West, Circle Theatre, Dallas Children’s Theater, Theatre Three, Second Thought Theatre, Bishop Arts Theatre Center, Kansas Repertory Theatre, Cape May Stage, Anacostia Playhouse, Scena Theatre, RuPaul’s DragCon Los Angeles, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Her scenic designs for Rift, or White Lies and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat were selected through a national juried process for inclusion in the United States National Exhibition at the 2027 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space.
Mazur holds an MFA from the University of Kansas and is a tenured Professor of Theatre Design and Head of the BFA Design & Technology program at the University of Texas at Arlington. She maintains professional membership with the United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT).
Do not expect theatre to satisfy the habits of its audience, but to change them. -Bertolt Brecht