Camilla Tassi ’16 majored in computer science and music at Notre Dame, always searching for connections between the two. But back then, combining her academic interests into work as a professional projection designer — that is, producing the still and video images that accompany theatrical or orchestral productions — didn’t register as an option.
“As an undergrad?” she says. “I had no idea this was even a field. Not at all.”
Tassi still finds it hard to put her work into words. When people ask what she does, it’s easier to point them to camillatassi.com, where the audiovisuals — like the images in the slideshow below — illustrate her long list of credits. To name just two that sound cool: a recent performance of composer Osvaldo Golijov’s song cycle Falling Out of Time at New York’s Carnegie Hall and another of Mozart’s Magic Flute with the Berlin Opera Academy.
This year Tassi received the $25,000 Burry Fredrik Design Fellowship from Yale University’s drama school, where she completed an MFA in May after earning a master’s degree in digital musics at Dartmouth College.
You can hear more about Tassi on the magazine’s podcast, The Endless Conversation, including the path she took from her native Florence, Italy, to the United States with her family when she was a child — and then to Notre Dame after her mother found it online.
“I’m not kidding,” Tassi says. “I’m pretty sure she Googled ‘Catholic colleges in America.’”
Jason Kelly is an associate editor of this magazine.