Nathan Evans
Overview
Nathan Evans is a three-time award-winning emerging Australian production designer for film and television, drawing on more than 20 years of multidisciplinary practice across advertising, architecture and interiors, exhibition and event design.
Awards
His most recent recognition from the Australian Production Design Guild (APDG) is APDG Awards 2026: WYSIWYG 3D Design for a Short Form Screen Production Award for the short film Collect Call. Nathan’s first APDG win was the 2025 AFTRS Emerging Designer for a Screen Production Award for Interview with a Hero. At the 2026 ReelGood Film Festival, Interview with a Hero won Best Film and Nathan received Best Off‑Screen Talent for Production Design for the same work. At the 2026 St Kilda Film Festival, Interview with a Hero was recognised through director Celeste Diep’s Best Director award, while its production design was nominated, but did not win, for Best Achievement in Production Design.
Collect Call premiered at Flickerfest at Bondi Pavilion in Sydney in 2026, then screened at the Forbidden Worlds Film Festival in Bristol where it won a Best Sci‑Fi/Fantasy short award, and at the Melbourne International CINEVERSE Film Festival at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI).
Features
Since graduating from AFTRS, Nathan has moved into feature‑length work. He is currently in pre‑production as production designer on House, his second feature. His first feature, Hook, saw him serve as co‑art director, co‑costume designer and graphic designer; both projects are progressing through production and release scheduling.
Festivals – Interview with a Hero
Interview with a Hero has had a substantial international festival run. To date it has screened at eleven major events and curated programs:
- Sydney Film Festival – Dendy Awards for Australian Short Films.
- Melbourne International Film Festival – Accelerator Lab.
- CinefestOZ.
- Adelaide Film Festival.
- Cambodia International Film Festival (CIFF), Phnom Penh.
- SXSW London.
- Atlanta Film Festival – official shorts selection.
- Heart of Gold International Short Film Festival.
- ReelGood Film Festival – where it won Best Film and Best Off‑Screen Talent for Production Design.
- St Kilda Film Festival – Australia’s Top Short Film Competition.
- Harbour City Cinema at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Television
Nathan is known for art directing the SBS television series Meet the Chang's (2022) and serving as production designer on its follow‑up series Meet Leila and Ziad (2023).
AFTRS Training and Design Showcase West
From 2023 to 2024, Nathan completed a Master of Arts Screen in Production Design at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS). During this time he was production designer on eight short films: Kowloon Nights (2023), Action Not Hope! (2023), Escape! (2023), Darwin (2023) — a proof‑of‑concept for the TV series Seven Valleys — Framing Resistance (2023), Collect Call (2024), Interview with a Hero (2024), and Chahārshanbe Suri (2024).
His graduate work was invited to exhibit at Design Showcase West at UCLA, an initiative of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television that serves as a national entertainment design showcase for graduate student work from leading university programs and is attended by producers, directors and senior designers scouting new talent. In October 2025 he presented an academic poster at the inaugural Production Design Research and Education Network (PD‑REN) conference Scene & Unseen: The Invisible Art of Production Design, hosted at the University of Westminster’s Regent Street Campus in London, titled “Expediting World Building Through Agile Innovation: A Production Design Case Study of Collect Call.”
Academic Profile and PhD
Alongside industry work, Nathan maintains a strong academic profile. He holds a Master of Arts Screen in Production Design from AFTRS, a Master of Film and Digital Image from Sydney College of the Arts at the University of Sydney, a Bachelor of Design in Architecture from the University of Sydney, a Graduate Certificate in Design Science (Building), and a Bachelor of Design and Technology from Western Sydney University. He has been accepted to commence PhD research at Western Sydney University titled “The Digital Production Designer: Generative AI and the Future of World Building in Screen Media.”
Teaching and Other Projects
Nathan has taught as a Graphic Design and Exhibition Design lecturer at institutions including ACU, Qantm College and Raffles College. He has completed his first television commercial for the charity Hope in a Suitcase and recently production designed LEAN, a Bus Stop Films short that places its core concept — a world in which people and their surroundings exist on a 45‑degree lean — squarely on the shoulders of the production design. Working to a two‑week turnaround on a modest budget, he transformed a suburban living room into a detailed, slightly kitsch Italian restaurant, with every prop, lighting fixture and piece of dressing reinforcing the film’s visual logic. Director Tony Radevski has described Nathan as “incredibly resourceful, with strong conceptual and graphic skills that allowed him to communicate ideas clearly before then working out how to make them achievable in the real space,” noting that cast and crew were “genuinely amazed by what he had managed to create” and that he would “recommend him wholeheartedly.”
Additional Roles
In addition to his production design practice, Nathan works as a graphic designer at Mint Pictures, developing innovative and interactive pitch decks for factual television. He also volunteers his time to the Australian Production Design Guild as its Social Media Representative.
