OPEN CALL for PRAGUE QUADRENNIAL 2027

The United States Institute for Theatre Technology invites you to submit your work for consideration to be included as part of the professional and emerging U.S. exhibitions at the 2027 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space (PQ27), the world’s largest international platform for scenography and performance design. In June 2027, USITT will present a curated selection of U.S. live performance design as part of the 16th edition and 60th anniversary of the PQ.

Founded in 1967, the Prague Quadrennial has become the world’s largest platform for performance design and scenography, bringing together artists, scholars, students, and audiences every four years to experience design as a live, spatial, and performative practice.

The U.S. Artistic Vision: THE MOSAIC WE SHARE

The U.S. exhibition for PQ 2027 is titled E Pluribus Unum: Scenographic Fragments of an American Mosaic and we invite you to read the Artistic Statement at the bottom of this page for the submission.

American scenography, like the American experience, is not singular. It is formed from many origins, traditions, migrations, and lived experiences. Like a mosaic, each fragment contributes its own history, material language, and point of view. Together, these fragments form a picture that is dynamic, varied, and always evolving.

In dialogue with PQ 2027’s theme, Absences and Silences as Spaces of Potential for New Scenographic Futures, the U.S. exhibition considers how what is missing, unseen, or unheard can become a site of connection, imagination, and possibility.

THE SPACES BETWEEN FRAGMENTS

USITT recognizes that designers and theatre artists work across a wide range of professional paths and self-defined identities. The U.S. exhibition seeks to reflect the full breadth of scenographic practice in the United States, including experimental and emerging voices, commercial and regional work, community-based practice, and foreign-born artists who have made the United States their artistic home, and shaped its cultural and spatial landscape.

Submissions of realized work are welcome from students, early-career practitioners, independent artists, collectives, and established designers working across disciplines, scales, and contexts. We encourage proposals from artists whose work has historically been underrepresented, overlooked, or situated outside dominant institutional narratives. Submissions must have been produced after May 1, 2022. 

Each fragment matters. Each voice reshapes the whole. We invite you to consider what your fragment makes visible—and what new possibilities emerge in the spaces between.

The submission portal can be accessed by clicking here from March 18, 2026 and will close July 6, 2026.

As artists from around the world gather in Prague to reflect on sixty years of scenographic exchange and to imagine what comes next, we hope you will join us.

With thanks,
the 2027 PQ Curatorial Team, USITT

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PQ-USITT 2027 Artistic Statement 

E Pluribus Unum: 

Scenographic Fragments of an American Mosaic

The United States Institute for Theatre Technology’s (USITT) 2027 Prague Quadrennial (PQ) exhibition, E Pluribus Unum: Scenographic Fragments of an American Mosaic, celebrates the artistry, complexity, and contradictions of a nation assembled from many origins. Like the varied tesserae of a vast mosaic, the designers and theatremakers of the United States bring traditions, histories, and imaginations—each fragment beautiful in its own right—together to form a larger picture: whole, dynamic, and always evolving.

Our American mosaic is not static. It fractures, shifts, and reforms. Between each piece lies space—absence, possibility, and connection. In harmony with PQ 2027’s theme, Absences and Silences as Spaces of Potential for New Scenographic Futures, this exhibition explores how diverse roots, migrations, and lived experiences become new languages of design and storytelling. Each fragment—each artist—adds a unique color, memory, and voice to the collective picture and gives rise to something greater, something more complete. A missing piece, while absent, is never a void; it is an invitation to connect, to share, to build.

The U.S. contribution will showcase a wide range of design practices—from experimental and emerging voices, to the artistry of Broadway, to the vision of foreign-born designers who have made the United States their artistic home. Together, these works reveal the living mosaic of American scenography: large and small, traditional and innovative, rooted and migratory, local and global.

E Pluribus Unum: Scenographic Fragments of an American Mosaic invites audiences to experience American scenography as a vibrant collection of stories, forms, and ideas—where diverse voices join in shared potential and boundless possibility. As each fragment contributes to the evolving picture, USITT welcomes submissions from all designers working in the United States, inviting every voice to find its place within this ever-forming composition.

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