The Art of the Possible
Theatre Design/Technology alumni Heather Wolensky’05, Kat DeNeve ’12, and Melissa Shakun ’08 all work in one of the most creative fields, that of late-night TV variety shows.
While Wolensky and DeNeve work in production design and art direction, respectively, on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Shakun is the art director for Saturday Night Live (SNL).
All three agree that, in addition to the technical skills needed to design sets, the main takeaway of their Purchase College education has been learning the art of the possible—the flexibility to get quality work done amidst a cacophony of competing demands, all at a head-spinning pace.
That kind of pragmatism entails knowing what isn’t possible, of course.
“They always ask for a car for some skit,” Wolensky says. “I’m like, ‘Guys, we work on the sixth floor, I promise you I cannot put a car in the elevator.’ But every month or so we get a new request for something like that.”
While those kinds of requests are relatively rare, they’re much easier to handle than the day-to-day production schedule of a topical daily show.
“We move at a pace that is pretty unheard of,” Wolensky says. “We get no time to design anything—it’s all about the art, but we also do a show every single night, so there’s a lot of problem-solving: How are we going to make this look good on camera tonight—and then do it all over again tomorrow?”
Wolensky can trace her route to the late-night TV world back to her time at Purchase, when she did an internship for the legendary Broadway set designer Tony Walton. One of the people working with Walton was Kelly Hanson, who now co-heads the art department for The Tonight Show with Wolensky. The two clicked, and soon started a company together called Wonder Works Design, LLC that allowed them to take on a variety of projects including television, digital shoots, interiors, and corporate events.
When Hanson was offered the position of art director for the 2008 launch of Fallon’s show, she recruited Wolensky to assist her. “I was hired to build a model of the set for The Tonight Show,” Wolensky says. “I was so excited to get my foot in the door at NBC.” Ever since getting her foot in the door, Wolensky’s feet have barely touched the ground. “The creative juices are constantly flowing and you just have to go with the flow, and I like that about it,” Wolensky says. “The pace is very addicting.”
Wolensky acknowledges that the frenetic pace of a daily show would be much harder without talented and industrious collaborators. That’s why she recruited Kat DeNeve. “I met Kat at a Purchase alumni event,” Wolensky says. “I had been talking to Dan Hanessian, who was the dean of the program at the time, about how I needed some fresh blood. He suggested I talk to Kat.”
As a Purchase grad, Wolensky trusted DeNeve’s background, knowing she had the core values she’d need to succeed in the daily show environment.
“I hired Kat and she’s been with us ever since,” Wolensky says. “It would be hard to do a project without her. I knew she had the drafting skills, and I knew she’d be punctual because you’re never late to class at Purchase!”
DeNeve was an assistant designer at Youmans Designs, owned by James Youmans ’86 at the time she met Wolensky.
“I [became a production assistant] on The Tonight Show for what was supposed to be a week nine years ago, and then I never left,” DeNeve says.
Today, while Wolensky primarily works on sketches that take place outside of the studio, DeNeve largely works with Hanson on anything that takes place in the studio.
“I’m focused on the everyday show,” DeNeve says. “My job is heavily about drafting and renderings and seeing that through to reality. The designers usually give me a sketch or an idea for a design, and I then translate that to drafting and editing with the writers.”
Most sketches for the show are planned ahead of time—DeNeve usually gets about a week’s notice—but there are also topical bits that take place during Fallon’s monologue. DeNeve says she spends about half her time drafting and the other half dealing with the monologue sketches.
“The quantity of stuff that you get is really exciting,” DeNeve says. “That’s both the bad thing and the good thing about it—because even though you’re inundated with everything, once the show’s over, the next day is a clean slate.”
One of the more fun, and more challenging, projects for DeNeve came during the height of the COVID pandemic when she, Wolensky, and Hanson teamed up to build out an Airstream camper as a remote set in Fallon’s backyard in the Hamptons.
“That was a heavy lift for us, and one of the most complicated pieces that we’ve done,” DeNeve says. “Heather and Kelly designed it, and I drafted it and worked over every little detail with the shop, and it turned out beautiful.”
Along with the challenge of creative work for a mercurial daily show, DeNeve is also energized by the personal and professional connections she’s made along the way. “We’re mainly a women-driven team, which is pretty remarkable for the industry,” DeNeve says. “I had only worked for men up until I came to The Tonight Show, so that’s something I’m pretty proud of.”
Shakun designs scenery and art directs live sketches for SNL each week, and her route to late-night TV was similar to Wolensky’s and DeNeve’s in that it can be attributed to a Purchase College connection.“I had a professor named Charles McCarry, who was a great set designer, and one of our class projects was to design a set for SNL.” At the time, Shakun thought she wanted to be a set designer for Broadway musicals; she didn’t want to design for TV.
“Flash forward 15 years and here I am,” Shakun says. “I’ve been designing on this show for 90-something episodes now and I love it. It’s really the best of both worlds—it’s like working in theater and television at the same time.”
Because SNL is a live show filmed in front of a studio audience, it’s necessarily fast-paced. It’s always challenging, Shakun says, and it’s also always exciting.
“The only constant at SNL is change,” Shakun says. “Inevitably, the writers are going to write something new, and it’s going to be hard or challenging. You have to be really smart about thinking on your toes. It never seems to get easier, but I think you get better at handling how hard it is.”
Shakun says she feels prepared for that kind of work because the Design/Technology program at Purchase was a conservatory program; every aspiring designer also had to be a prop master for one show, the paint charge for another show, and so on.
“In order to be a good set designer, you really need to know how all of the departments working under you do their jobs,” Shakun says. “So you learn how all the different teams and departments collaborate together to create a set design, and I think that is the most valuable [Purchase] experience.”
