Image credits: Photography by CRISPI, Courtesy of Rainshadow Studios

About the artist

Elizabeth Mak is an interdisciplinary artist and designer whose practice lies at the intersection of performance, climate, and systems thinking. Her work investigates how participatory and interactive forms of art can function as methods of inquiry, revealing, rehearsing, and reimagining the behavioural systems that underpin social and environmental crises.

She is the Founder and Artistic Director of Rainshadow Studios, a Singapore-based climate arts and education non-profit dedicated to reimagining environmental engagement through art and dialogue. She has designed over 100 productions across the United States, Europe, and Asia with institutions such as HBO, The Public Theater, and the Kennedy Center.

Elizabeth holds an MFA in Design from the Yale School of Drama and currently lectures at Nanyang Technological University’s School of Art, Design and Media. Her academic and creative research explores the politics of interaction, the role of participation in socially-engaged performance, and the potential of embodied experience to reframe our relationship to complex ecological and social systems.

Artist Statement

At the centre of Elizabeth’s practice is the interest in participation as a performative system, one through which individuals rehearse and reproduce learned behaviours, yet which also holds the potential for disruption and renewal. And so, she is keen to explore how participatory performance can serve as a mode of inquiry into the economic, ecological, and behavioural systems that shape contemporary life.

Through dialogic and socially-engaged frameworks, Elizabeth’s installations place participants back at the centre of meaning-making, challenging the passive consumption of immersive experiences and positioning audiences as active agents within complex systems. Her most recent work, Scarce City, which premiered at National Gallery Singapore in 2025, integrated scenographic thinking with emerging technologies—such as spatial audio, 3D printing, and interactive cameras—to create an experience that questions dominant narratives of consumption, growth, and progress. Across these mediated yet human-centred encounters, Elizabeth seeks to re-centre the body and the senses as vital sites of collective knowledge production within the climate crisis.

During her residency at SMU Libraries, Elizabeth will develop The Annihilation of Time, a participatory artwork that interrogates the temporal conditions of late capitalism. The project traces the entanglements between fossil fuels, speed, and meaning, proposing a counter-movement toward slowness and attention. Combining a night walk across geological deep time with facilitated rituals of collective reflection, the work invites participants to reclaim time as a shared embodied resource, one through which new forms of meaning, agency, and ecological consciousness might emerge.