About
Haiyan Hester Xue is a set and costume designer working between the UK and China, creating performance spaces for opera, theatre and live performance.
Her fascination with opera and classic texts stems from their resistance to complete translation. They no longer fit neatly into the contemporary world, and it is precisely this dissonance that fuels her work. She explores the friction between the timeless and the topical, approaches these classics as diagnostic tools: when placed in the right context, they reveal the obscured anxieties and faults of the present moment.
Hester trained at an academic fine art high school before graduating with a First-Class BA from Wimbledon College of Arts and an MA at Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. She received the Linbury Prize 2025 as one of 12 recipients.