Robert Kaplowitz has spent the last 25 years running his own company as a sound designer and composer, and has been honored with a Tony Award as Best Sound Designer of A Musical for Fela! and an OBIE Award for Sustained Excellence In Sound Design, among other highly flattering celebrations of his work.
As an artist, he is most interested in the stories told by deliberately curated sound and music, and how those stories interact with society. He realized, early in his career as a freelance artist, that it was also essential that he navigate and understand the business world as an entrepreneur; first acquiring skills like contract negotiations and competitive bidding, and later finding himself immersed in new product development and the application of extant products to new fields.
Based in Philadelphia, USA since 2010, he has worked there for a wide range of theater companies including PlayPenn, The Wilma, Interact, The Arden, Lucidity Suitcase, Pig Iron, The Lantern and the Philadelphia Theater Company. In NYC, his work has been heard on Broadway, as well as at The Apollo, The Signature, The Public, New York Theater Workshop, MTC, 2nd Stage, the Vineyard, MCC, and untold numbers of small theaters, most of which have likely since been closed by safety inspectors. His designs and music have been heard regionally and internationally with venues and/or companies including The National Theatre of England, The Guthrie, The Alley, Dallas Theater Center, Sundance, the O’Neill, Pilobolus, BAM, the Kennedy Center, the Amsterdam Festival, Arts Emerson and the Expo Center in Lagos.
While working on the world premiere of Amy Herzog’s Belleville in 2011, his frustration at the lack of an extent technology to ring cel phones on demand (a storytelling device that has become essential in modern theater) led him to shift from a single entity to an LLC, so that he could hire an app developer to help him create “Stagecaller” for iOS (and eventually Android.) Working with Jay Konopka, of Disappointed Pig, Kaplowitz’s Nine Hostage Arts became the lead developer in a technological tool that has been used in thousands of productions, at hundreds of theaters worldwide. His LLC also now serves as his base of operations as a designer, a rehearsal and recording studio in an underserved community in West Philadelphia’s Promise Zone neighborhood Mantua, and the host for the offices and rehearsal spaces of Philadelphia’s premiere outdoor Shakespeare company (Shakespeare in Clark Park.)
He is the composer of two musical works – Minors, which is an exploration of the Luzerne County “Kids for Cash” judicial scandal from 2008, and which will is opening at the Lantern Theater Company in May of 2019 and Leviathan (A Hard Rock Riff on Moby Dick).
He has recently begun creating site-specific sound installations; most recently for the Prague’s National Museum of Stone Sculpture (The Lapidarium) as a part of the inaugural PQ Projects / 36Q program. Current installations in progress include soundtracks for the renovation of the fountain at Ben Franklin Park in Philadelphia, and another commission by PQ Projects in Prague, opening in the summer of 2019.
Other roles include his position on the Faculty at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, the leader of the annual Masterclass in Sound Design at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Committee Member for the 24th Ward, 4th District in Philadelphia, and proud spouse and parent in his delightful family.