Hannah Birch-Carl is an artist specializing in theater-making and mixed media art. Her focus is largely on creating works that reflect the bewildering and baroque reality she has grown accustomed to due to her experiences living with multiple visual processing disturbances, including Visual Snow Syndrome, palinopsia, synesthesia, as well as what she describes as “extreme pareidolia” — a consistent and lifelong affliction.
A natural lover of performing and making theatre, Hannah was hired to design her first professional production in 2010 while she was still attending college at San Francisco State University (B.A. Drama with Performance Emphasis), creating an array of costumes for an adaptation of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari that was performed with flashlights in a real BDSM dungeon located on SF's famed Folsom street. Soon after, she shifted her focus (but not her declared major) from acting to sound design, a subject for which there weren’t any instructors on staff at the time, let alone classes offered. After graduating with honors in 2011, she moved almost immediately into professional sound design with Adam Bock’s PHAEDRA (Shotgun Players), which garnered favorable attention from audiences and critics alike.
Hannah would go on to sound design productions all over the San Francisco Bay Area for theaters and companies including but not limited to Crowded Fire Theatre (SF), Aurora Theatre Co (Berkeley), Z Space (SF), ACT’s Costume Shop (SF), Marin Theatre Co (Mill Valley, CA), and at the Zellerbach Playhouse at UC Berkeley. She served as the resident sound designer for Town Hall Theatre in Lafayette, CA from 2013 to 2017. In 2016, her compositions for THE VILLAGE BIKE (Shotgun Players) were referred to as being both “the sexiest thing about [the] play” and “one of the worst off stage sound effects I’ve ever heard” by reviewers for The Daily Californian and KQED, respectively.
During her time in the Bay, she often participated in the performance-based monthly event Klanghaus, notably starring as Teddy in A PLAY ABOUT LEAVING an original play exploring the notions of home and despair in a frightening techno-dystopian world. She had the pleasure of participating in The Ground Floor, Berkeley Rep’s play development workshop, providing ambient sound for THE SUMMER PLAY, written/adapted by Annie Smart and directed by Mina Morita. Not long before leaving California, she played a mute nurse in the glam-rock inspired performance installation HAWKMOON (created by Christine Crook and based on the poetry of Sam Shepard) and later collaborated with playwright Christopher Chen on HOME INVASION, a hyper-dimensional murder mystery performed on location inside a living room.
Having migrated cross-country in 2017, Hannah now lives in Brooklyn, New York. She has continued to work as both a sound designer and scenic artist for theater, occasionally showing and selling her personal works in both CA and NYC. In her paintings she explores the similarities of various natural patterns, effectively blurring the lines between formations in stone, clouds, water, fire and smoke. With these patterns she turns abstract swathes of color into supernatural and intricately crystalline landscapes that attempt to invoke simultaneously a sense of childlike wonder and existential drama. She is influenced by the elaborately illustrative styles of Kay Nielsen and Boris Vallejo as well as the fauna, flora, and natural stone formations of the Sierra Nevada mountains where she was raised.
In sculpture she works heavily with found objects and recycled materials, owing to her childhood tendency to take things apart and reuse materials from older creations when art supplies were scarce. She employs these materials to engineer bizarre and fantastical figurines while exploring the themes of waste, overproduction, feminine sexuality, theology, death, mythology, mental illness and environmentalism, with at times an audatious facetiousness that she considers to be at the very core of her being. Humor, she believes, is absolutely necessary to be able to process the many absurd horrors of the world.
Hannah is a regular volunteer with the 52nd Street Project and was a recipient of the 2022 Creatives Rebuild New York Basic Income for Artists program.
More of her past work can be seen here.