Stephan Olson has a 25+ year career of award-winning work in design for Television and Theater. 

 

He has designed television shows for CBS, ABC, NBC/Universal, FOX, Sony, Warner Bros, Netflix, and HBO Max.

 

As a Production Designer in television, Steve is responsible for the four-time Emmy-Award winning Production Design of the hit series How I Met Your Mother, which was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Art Direction in eight its nine seasons. Designs for other shows have garnered six additional Emmy nominations, as well as twenty-one Art Directors Guild nominations for Excellence in Production design. His first show, Titus, was Nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Art Direction and won the ADG Award for Excellence in Production Design. His most recent project, Live in Front Of A Studio Audience - The Facts of Life & Diff'rent Strokes also won the Award for Excellence in Production Design.

 

Steve was the Art Director for Roy Christopher on four Academy Award telecasts, each one nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Art Direction and each one winning the  ADG Award for Excellence in Production Design. He also served as Art Director on multiple telecasts of Emmy Awards and Tony Awards.

 

Prior to his years in television, Steve worked as a Scenic Designer and Associate Designer on Broadway and Off-Broadway, as well as opera and regional theater. Associate design credits with Tony Walton on Broadway include the Tony Award-winning Guys and Dolls, the Tony-nominated Grand Hotel and Will Rogers Follies, as well as the award winning play Six Degrees of Separation. He was also the Associate Designer for the Tony Award winning production of Rogers and Hammerstein's Carousel at Lincoln Center. He earned high critical praise for his Broadway design of The Play’s the Thing, the Off-Broadway production of Below The Belt and his production of Randy Newman’s Harps and Angels directed by Jerry Zaks at the Mark Taper Forum. Internationally, he designed the Canadian production of Death of a Salesman starring Judd Hirsch (Royal Alexandra Theater, Toronto) and the Berlin production of Gypsy (Theater Des Westens).

 

Early in his career, Steve worked with avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson on the operas Salome  (Milan), Jazz Opera  (Hamburg), and The Forest  (Berlin). He storyboarded the Phillip Glass opera Einstein on the Beach and David Byrne's The Forest for planned feature films.

 

Steve received his MFA in Scenic Design from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He received his undergraduate degree in Art from University of Wisconsin, Madison. Steve hails from Minneapolis Minnesota, and currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife and family.