Nic Ularu was a recipient of an Obie award for 2003. The special citation was awarded May 19th for set designs for the new play, Talking Head's Painted Snake in a Painted Chair, presented at La MaMa in January of this year.

The Obies, founded by the Village Voice newspaper in 1955, are the most highly regarded honors for off- and off-off-Broadway theatre. Recent Obie winners include Elaine Stritch, George C. Wolfe, Ingmar Berman, Mary-Louise Parker, Lynne Thigpen, Charlayne Woodard, Debra Monk, Swoosie Kurtz, and many others.

“ We’re proud of the scope and quality of our professors’ work, here and at theatres all over the country,” says Department Chair Jim O’Connor. “It’s always great to see our judgement echoed by recognition from others. Even so, we’re all bowled over with pleasure that Nic has received an Obie.”

This summer in a separate honor, Nic Ularu’s designs will appear in the American entry at the Prague Quadrennial Exhibition 2003, the main international event in the realm of theatre design. This prestigious exhibition, sometimes called “the Olympics of theatre design,” is held every four years.

Professor Ularu joined the USC Department of Theatre and Dance in January 2001. For Theatre South Carolina, he has designed sets for King Lear, Antigone, The Shape of Things, and The Darker Face of the Earth, amongst others.

Ularu had this to say about designing Painted Snake: "I was intrigued by the challenges of the text and the combination of realism and metaphor included in the setting. I am always tempted to transform the realism into what’s theatrically essential for the visual universe of the play, but this time the text asked for realism in order to express its metaphor. Therefore I conceived a set looking more like a set for a TV soap opera, but having some special theatrical effects that transforms the banality of a house into a strange universe.”

Painted Snake was performed at La MaMa, an arts complex of national and international celebrity in New York City. La Mama develops, produces and presents new and original performance work by artists of all nations and cultures.

Born in Bucharest, Romania, Professor Ularu has extensive design credits in America and Europe, including theatres in Sweden, Northern Ireland, The Netherlands and Romania. Professor Ularu was head of scenography at the National Theatre of Bucharest, vice-president of the Romanian Center of International Organization of Scenographers, Technicians and Theatre Architects (OISTAT) and member of the board of the European League of the Institutes of the Arts (ELIA). He has taught scene and/or costume design in Germany, Sweden, England, Italy, Denmark and Hong Kong. In the US he taught at Smith College and gave lectures/ workshops at the Universities of Minnesota, Iowa, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Tennessee.

For more about the Obie awards, visit the Village Voice website.