Vincent Olivieri (Vinnie to his friends) is a freelance Sound Designer/Composer and faculty member at the University of California-Irvine, where he teaches in the MFA program. Vinnie balances his academic work with a diverse array of creative projects. Earlier this fall, he took an experimental theatre show to Eastern Europe for a small tour and designed a spatial design for an art installation about the Venezuelan immigrant diaspora. He’s currently preparing for a trip to Lagos Nigeria, to work on a sound design and score.
Vinnie was born and raised in Virginia Beach, VA. As a kid, he and his cousins would “borrow” his uncle’s reel-to-reel recorder to make pretend radio shows, complete with call-ins featuring fictional bickering old biddies named Mabel and Josephine. In high school, he stumbled into sound design when his theatre director challenged him to build a live percussion score for a production. “I grabbed every piece of percussion gear I could out of the band room, jammed it all in the pit, and improvised a score alongside the actors,” he recalls. It wasn’t until college in Richmond (where he studied math, music, and education) that he did his first billed design. “I loved that sound design sits at the intersection of theatre, music, and technology,” he says. “It tickled my brain, and I loved that it’s a team art form that requires close work with other humans.” It was during a design of King Lear in college when he realized this is what he wanted to do for a career; he created the design and score, performing live each night with two additional musicians/operators. “Each night, I fell into a flow, working with my partners to build the design, riding the energy of the acting company. I thought, if I could ever find a way to feel that way for the rest of my life, I’d be the luckiest guy in the world.” After college, he earned his MFA in Sound Design at the Yale School of Drama.
When asked to share a collaboration or project that felt meaningful or successful, Vinnie reflected back on an early project when on staff at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Designing August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, he developed the sound of Sutter’s Ghost using an old upright piano harp. He recalls wheeling the harp into the rehearsal hall to create the score in the room alongside the actors and director. “As we got close to tech, I needed to prepare to record the harp. I asked the company if they could run the ending sequence without my playing so that I could take notes. When we tried to run without the harp, the actors couldn’t get through the final scene,” he says. “Our work had become so intertwined that one couldn’t exist without the other. It was a very affirming moment for me about how successful our relationship between sound and performance could be.”
Vinnie credits a wide range of mentors and collaborators who shaped his journey. In his early years, his band director Mike King and drama teacher Nancy Curtis were pivotal influences. In graduate school, his mentor David Budries inspired Vinnie’s own mentoring style, “a little detached, but full of curiosity and empathy.” Professionally, he’s been guided by figures like Darron West, who evolved from mentor to peer, and colleagues such as Brad Berridge and Davin Huston, longtime friends and daily gif senders. At UC Irvine, his colleague Mike Hooker has been a mentor, friend, and co-worker since Vinnie joined the faculty in 2007.
These days, Vinnie’s creative and research focus is on spatial audio, a rapidly evolving field. “The landscape is changing so fast, and there’s so much to keep up with,” he says. His current research explores 3D spatial audio control systems: “I don’t think anyone has figured out how to do it well yet. All of our solutions are basically good first passes.” As an educator, Vinnie is also thinking about AI and teaching the new generation. “AI is a messy solution but one we need to engage with and think through” he explains. “And today’s generation of students are very different from those from 15 or 30 years ago. They have new values, different toolsets, and I can’t teach them the same way I did when I started teaching. Teachers have to meet students where they are.”
Reflecting on identity, Vinnie is deeply conscious of his privilege and how it informs his teaching and design philosophy. “My life has been a continual unveiling of the magnitude of my privilege,” he shares. “It’s changed how I think about who should be in this field, how I can help make that happen, and how I recruit and retain students. When I work on projects about people whose experiences differ from mine, I take that responsibility seriously and do my research. If I’m entrusted to help tell these stories, I want to do right by the lives that fed them.”
Vinnie’s favorite part of the creative process is the first few days of tech. “It’s when we see if any of our old ideas work and start layering in the new ones. I love the messiness of it all.” His least favorite time is the fine-tuning stages after the second preview: “It’s hard to stay focused to work on the nitty-gritty. I just want to move on to the next project.”
Looking ahead, Vinnie hopes to see TSDCA continue its work fostering meaningful dialogue and helping young designers transition into professional life. Early-career members are uniquely positioned to lead important conversations on issues we face as working designers.
When offering advice to aspiring designers and educators, Vinnie would like to share the following: “If you want to design, take music classes and learn a bit of guitar or piano; that musicianship will feed your growth as a designer. If you want to teach, study pedagogy. Great designers don’t always make great instructors. And in general, be kind. Very few people will put up with a below-the-line asshole. Pleasant, skilled designers generally have more successful careers than extraordinary designers who are stone-cold jerks.”
Vinnie’s Picks
- Go-To Tech Snacks: Water, coffee, and Diet Coke (cans, not bottles); he doesn’t bring snacks himself, but he will often snack on whatever his assistant brings. “Everyone should hire Melanie Falcón; not only is she talented, but her tech snacks are the best.”
- Hobbies: Cooking, mixology, travel, photography, and spending time with family.
- Pet Peeves: deliberately inaccurate reports (“every once in a while I get on a production where important information is left off the report because someone doesn’t want to embarrass someone else”) and wasted time during tech (like when “the director gives two hours of notes to the actors while the production company waits in the theatre”).
- Fun Fact: Vinnie is classically trained as a percussionist. He also plays clawhammer banjo and the piano (“enough to write music but not to be mistaken for an actual pianist”)
- Frequently Used Tools: FileMaker Pro, Reaper, Live, Kontakt, Opus, FabFilter, PhasePlant, QLab, MaxMSP.
- Technology That Changed His Workflow: too many to count (his first designs were on reel-to-reels and DAT, so there’s been lots of change), but his latest game-changers are the Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol controller and Softube Console1 Fader.
- Alternate Non-Theatre Career: Data storytelling (he is fascinated by infographics). He was certified as a high school math teacher but thinks he “would get bored teaching the same thing every year.”
- Weird Addition to Rider: “Designer generally stands for the last hour of every tech rehearsal, so no tech tables should be placed behind him.”
Interviewed by Erica Fox and Aaron Woodstein