is an queer and trans ensemble-driven theater and media collective creating work at the intersections of performance, emerging technology, and community care. We are committed to building spaces where live art, virtual worlds, and social practice overlap—where the stage extends into the headset, the street, the archive, and the body.
Our practice is rooted in collaboration. We are artists, designers, and storytellers who come together across disciplines to craft performances, immersive installations, and digital platforms that amplify marginalized voices, reimagine archives, and propose futures shaped by queer, trans, and disabled perspectives.
We believe theater can function as both ritual and research: a place to test how technologies of the present—VR, AR, projection, sound, code—can help us remember, connect, and imagine otherwheres. Our projects often emerge from long-term partnerships with communities and institutions, weaving together interviews, oral histories, and design experiments into collective acts of performance and remembering.
Future Ghost makes work for stages, galleries, clinics, and city streets. Our productions have included multimedia performances, virtual archives of queer care, augmented sound-walks, and hybrid research-practice projects in collaboration with public health and community organizations. Across forms, our aim remains constant: to create spaces of radical belonging where art, technology, and care entwine.
FUTURE GHOST IS:
LYAM B. GABEL
JOSEPH AMODEI
Lyam B. Gabel (they/he) is a trans* performance maker, theater director, and community archivist. Their work traces queer and trans lineages across time, living at the intersection of theater, oral history, and new media. They are co-director of Future Ghost and creator of the dance floor, the hospital room, and the kitchen table, which weaves together over 40 oral histories of caregivers, activists, and long-term survivors of HIV. Lyam co-directed Amm(i)gone at Woolly Mammoth and The Flea, and is a Drama League Next Stage Resident and former Fellow. They teach at Lehigh University and are always trying to learn how to love better when the world is ending.
Joseph Amodei (they/them) is a new media artist, theater designer, activist, and educator. Their work seeks to make material differences with and for people at the intersection of art, emerging technology, and community. Joseph grew up in North Carolina, where they received a BFA in Studio Art from UNC-Chapel Hill. Joseph completed their MFA in Video and Media Design at Carnegie Mellon. They are an assistant professor of Media Design in Lehigh University's Department of Theater. Recent work has explored immersive archive creation + Virtual Reality, mediated storytelling amplifying the Black history of the South, gameplay + gerrymandering, the HIV/AIDS crisis + performance of queer care, and Human Centered Design + issues of health equity.
FREQUENT COLLABORATORS:
SASHA JIN SCHWARTZ
Sasha Jin Schwartz (she/her) is a freelance theater scenic designer and artist inspired by family and how spaces tell stories. Selected Designs: the dance floor, the hospital room, and the kitchen table (The Voxel), Fat Ham (City Theatre Company), The Hobbit (Arden Theatre Company), Dragon Lady (Pittsburgh Public Theatre), Off Peak (59e59). Education: Carnegie Mellon School of Drama, BFA. Sasha is a receipient of the 1/52 grant, a PQ Featured Emerging Designer, and a TCG Rising Leader of Color. Her understanding of space and how and where we feel 'at-home' is shaped heavily by her mixed immigrant family and queer community.
HANNAH CORNISH
Hannah Cornish (she/her) is a New York City-based theatre maker, historian, and community engagement collaborator. Her work often marries musical composition, historical context, and unguarded collaboration to investigate grief, distort the illusion that history is a complete and fixed truth, and embrace the sweet catharsis of a dance break. Some of her favorite credits include: the dance floor, the hospital room, and the kitchen table (NOLA Contemporary Arts Center, Chatham University, Kelly Strayhorn Theater), The Father Who Stayed (Howland Cultural Center), and 100 Years Stray (Carnegie Mellon University).