About Cate Carter
Cate Carter is a client-focused, multi-award-winning show designer specialising in creating performance environments for stage, camera, and special events.
Cate prides herself on her ability to harness space, objects, and light, to create unique narrative-driven, storytelling ecosystems for her clients. Her objective: To push the boundaries of 3D design and ensure each show environment is the perfect solution.
Cate’s design approach endeavours to blend and juxtapose the physicality of scenic elements with the ethereal, sculptural, and architectural qualities of light and video. She uses these mediums to shape, enhance and even distort objects and the 3D spaces they inhabit. Cate’s talent for utilising a diverse and complex toolbox, and a carefully curated palette of materials and technology, delivers richly evocative and thought-provoking performance spaces in the live, video and digital domains.
Advice and Design
Cate’s collaborative and inventive approach to show design has seen her build and retain an impressive portfolio of world class artists, agencies, and multi-camera broadcast producers.
Her client-focused approach ensures that the power and emotion of the artist’s story is always the priority. Every distinctive, camera-friendly performance space that Cate shapes delivers a fitting, dynamic, creative environment for artists to perform from and within, while facilitating seamless, two-way communication between performer and audience.
Project Support / management
Cate’s extensive knowledge, understanding and imaginative ability to deploy video and lighting tools, scenery, and technology, in addition to her appreciation of the technical limitations and restrictions of any project, enable her to design and manage shows that advance the frontiers of stage design in uniquely stylish ways. Combined with her budget sensitive approach, Cate is well-practiced in attaining the very best from the brief, the resources, the equipment, her professional colleagues and the space and time available to her.
Design Principles
- To deliver unparalleled, accurate, empathetic, client-focused designs that imaginatively embrace the story the artist / performance must tell.
- Create meaningful, distinctive, engaging, camera-friendly stage environments that add value to a performance, enrich the client’s narrative and generates a cohesive setting from which the artist / performance can seamlessly interact with the audience.
- Agree to realistic deadlines and maintain clear, open communication between project stakeholders and deliver projects on time and on budget.
- Specify reliable, robust equipment, specifically built for the environment and rigours that each individual project demands, without compromising on creativity.
- Reduce the impact of environmental damage show designs may cause and engage in sustainable practices wherever possible.
Awards and Nominations
Four-time award winner for lighting and stage design on live music productions:
2018 - Knight of Illumination Award | Concert Touring Arena | ELBOW
2017 - Knight of Illumination Award | Events | SAMSUNG x ROYAL BLOOD
2014 - Knight of Illumination Award | Video Graphic Display| ELBOW
2010 - Knight of Illumination Award | Concert Touring Stage | EDITORS
Shortlisted for:
2024 - TPi Lighting Designer of the Year Award
2023 - TPi Lighting Designer of the Year Award
2020 - TPi Mark Fisher Set Designer of the Year Award
2017 - TPi Mark Fisher Set Designer of the Year Award
2014 - TPi Des Fallon Video Visionary Award
2012 - TPi Set Designer of the Year Award
2011 - Knights of Illumination | Concert Touring Arena Award