Rubie, Nina Scott and Polly Rowley-Sams as The Musical Spores / Photo by Tegid Cartwright
Photo by Tegid Cartwright
Nina (they/them) is a political theatre maker and educator based in London. Their work is celebratory, immersive and collaborative, exploring different creative tools for social change.
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Nina is Producer, Director and Co-Writer of 'Be More Mushroom', a raucous, educational musical for kids and grown ups exploring what fungi can teach us about identity, power and society. Be More Mushroom was developed as part of a residency at St. Margaret's House with Dan de la Motte and a group of queer performers, musicians and mycologists. It was recently performed at Queer Nature: After Hours at Kew Gardens and will be developed further in 2024. Alongside the show is multiple workshops for all ages creatively engaging with Queer Theory and Fungi.
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Nina is an experienced educator and facilitator. They currently lecture on the BA Theatre for Social Change course at Rose Bruford Drama School, teaching Creative Campaigning and Producing in Practice. Nina regularly works in Catalonia with ULEX, co-designing and delivering courses for activists across Europe including: 'Theatre of the Oppressed' (Nov 2023) 'Integral Activist Training' (Oct 2023 & 2022) and 'Creative Tools for Social Change' (April 2022).
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Alongside Emer Mary Morris, Nina was Artistic Director of You Should see the Other Guy Theatre (2014-2022), a London based grassroots collective made up of queer and women artists which worked on and off stage to tackle housing injustice. Nina has Co-produced, written and directed YSSTOG's Land of the Three Towers (Camden People's Theatre 2015-2019), a series of verbatim musicals which were performed on London housing estates. The plays share different methods of resisting gentrification and regeneration. The script of Land of the Three Towers: Vol I has been published in Radical Housing: Art Struggle and Care (ed, Ana Valencia, 2021) which can be downloaded and ordered here.
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Nina's baby (pun intended) is Womb with a View (WINNER Best Festival Venue, IAF 2017, WINNER Shambala micro-venues competition 2016), an immersive venue which gives birth to new ideas and an interactive performance which gives birth to YOU. The womb sets out to queer narratives of wombs, childbirth and parenthood. In 2021 Nina received Developing Your Creative Practice Funding to develop Womb with a View, exploring queering trans healthcare and telling the story of birth through cabaret, song and silliness.
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Nina has designed celebrated costumes for award winning companies including Kill the Beast's He Had Hairy Hands (WINNER Peter Brook Festival Award, WINNER Manchester Theatre Awards, BBC Top Pick of the Fringe) and The Boy Who kicked Pigs.
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A core part of Nina's practice is singing and song-making and they are a long standing member of queer choral collective F*Choir.
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THE BOY WHO KICKED PIGS (2014)
Writer: Kill the Beast
Performers: David Cumming, Natasha Hodgson, Ollie Jones, Zoe Roberts
Director: Clem Garritty
Lighting Designer: Elliot Griggs
Model Box Design: Clem Garritty & Bryan Woltjen
Costume Design: Nina Scott & Rachel Schofield Owen
Music: Ben Osborn
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The wonderful characters themselves that are so incredibly visual in the book do truly come alive on stage, with costume and make up being such a crucial key and designed so brilliantly by Nina Scott and Rachel Owen. ***** Sound and Vision
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There is a highly stylised feel to the design, Nina Scott's costumes are muted in colour but with masses of detail and faces and hair are inhumanly pale. At times it looks as though a macabre cartoon has been brought to life. ***** What's on Stage
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Packed with ingenuity and visual brilliance, The design of the show is remarkable, a symphony in grey [...] This is inventive, visually stunning stuff, made with a love and awareness of what has gone before. ***** A Younger Theatre
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The costume and set designers deserve credit. With each player having multiple characters to portray, the costume changes must be quick, and yet with only minimal changes in dress, the distinction between characters is immediate and undeniable. ***** Cult Box
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Nina Scott and Rachel Owen’s melancholic grey costumes and Bryan Woltjen’s kooky black and white projections really set the scene for this wickedly remarkable production **** Theatre Reviews Hub
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The company create a whole visual style that’s perhaps a little more Tim Burton than David Roberts (the illustrator of Baker’s book) within which Nina Scott’s amazing costumes and Brian Woltjen’s backdrops play a key part - The Reviews Hub
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Even more notable is how costume designer Nina Scott converted David Robert's‘ illustrations into a visual piece.**** TV Bomb
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Yes, what I liked about the beautiful, monochrome look of the production was its displacement of time, that idea of the real world pulled, sometimes grotesquely, out of shape. I was blindsided by how distinctive the voice was, how great the visuals were and just how playful and dark the entire thing was **** Exeunt Magazine
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