Design in a Frame of Emotion

Hannah Beachler is known as an award-winning production designer, but she tells the audience that she considers herself to be more of a story designer. As film stills and concept art from a few of those stories—Moonlight, Miles Ahead, Creed, Lemonade, and Black Panther—flash across a screen, Beachler engages in a conversation with Jacqueline Stewart and Toni L. Griffin about set building and curation, urban design, location scouting, Afrofuturism, fictional histories, and Black feminist narratives, and elucidates her role: a designer behind on-screen tableaux that provide not only visual feasts of artistry and imagination but also intimate spaces of emotion, humanity, and constructed memory.