About

Quills Fest is Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s annual festival where immersive technology and live performance come out to play.

Quills Fest 2022 engages artists and audiences around the world in Virtual Reality (VR), on the web, and in person, in a VR pop-up. Exhibitions of world-premiere Extended Reality (XR) experiences, performances that push the boundaries of liveness, and conversations that invite the audience into the behind-the-scenes of XR production highlight the most adventurous voices in art and immersive technology.

Quills Fest is an artist-centric space that invites the public into various stages in the life cycles of XR projects—from prototypes, to works-in-progress, to previous projects by the featured artists. 

Conceived by OSF Artistic Director Nataki Garrett and produced by the OSF Innovation & Strategy team, Quills Fest is a transmedia sandbox that radically expands access to the transformational power of storytelling and imagines a multimodal future of theatre.

About the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Led by Artistic Director Nataki Garrett and Executive Director David Schmitz, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) expands access to the transformational power of art and art-making. A global entity and an ever-evolving container for the future that responds to changing tides, the organization is committed to co-liberation through radically inclusive, accessible, and collaborative practices. OSF centers and nurtures artists and multimodal, multidisciplinary work.

OSF was founded in 1935 and has grown from a three-day festival of two plays to a nationally renowned theatre arts organization that presents a rotating repertory season of up to 8 plays and musicals, including both classics and new work. OSF productions have been presented on Broadway, internationally, and at regional, community, and high school theatres across the country. In 2020, the organization launched O!, its new digital stage featuring performances of groundbreaking art and mind-expanding discussions that can be accessed from anywhere in the world. O! attracts more than 10,000 views per month from audience members in over 50 countries. Learn more at osfashland.org.

Quills Fest 2022 marks the launch of a bespoke Quills Fest Virtual Reality World.

This playful, interactive, physics-defying take on OSF’s iconic Elizabethan theatre was helmed by OSF’s Creative Technologists in Residence Illya Szilak and Cyril Tsiboulski in an industry-first partnership with VAST, a festival and social multiverse platform by the Beijing-based Sandman Studios.

The Quills Fest VR World features avatar design by Selly Raby Kane, a renowned Sengalese fashion designer and artist pioneering Africa’s booming art and design movement, and original music by Justin Hicks, a groundbreaking multidisciplinary artist, composer, and vocalist.

Cyril Tsiboulski & Illya Szilak
Lead Artists and OSF Creative Technologists-in Residence

Paolo Barlascini, Architect and World Designer
Emmy Yupa, Lead Unreal Engine Developer
Claire Talbott, 3D Modeling Assistant
Alvaro Sierra, Developer
Allen Yee, Producer

Justin Hicks, Composer
Sean Davis, Sound Designer & Mixing Engineer
Selly Raby Kane, Avatar Designer and Artist
Dulce Baerga, 3D Artist and Avatar Modeler

VAST

Sandman Studios, Production Company
Mudi Zhou, Producer
Bingbing Wang, Production Manager
Wei Wang, Creative Technologist
Xin Yu, Developer leader
Shuo Huang, Weichen Liu, Developer
Zhuolin Li, Engine Artist
Ke Wang, Technical Coordinator
Shanshan Wang, 3D Artist
Feifei Luo, 2D Artist

Quills Fest 2022 is an O! Digital Stage Production.

Envisioned by OSF Artistic Director Nataki Garrett, O! Digital Stage is a transmedia platform featuring groundbreaking art, multimodal experiments, and mind-expanding discussions that you can experience at home. As a space for innovation and exploration at the intersection of theatre and new media, O! is OSF’s fourth official programmatic venue, bringing OSF’s celebrated artistry to a global audience.

Nataki Garrett, Executive Producer 

Scarlett Kim, Lead Producer
Rui Xu, Line Producer
Joshua Horvath, Production Manager

Producing Team
Liz Lanier
Mei Ann Teo
Evren Odcikin
victor cervantes jr.