[2] Early in her career, Byrd worked as an assistant to designers Jane Cox, Tyler Micoleau, Matt Frey, and Paul Toben.
The key themes across her body of work include an interest in how human scale relates to both architecture and the natural landscape, as well as observations and explorations in contrast, visual lyricism, shadow play, and the uncanny.
[2] Her work was crucial to creating the distinctive atmosphere of Will Arbery's Pulitzer-finalist play Heroes of the Fourth Turning, which premiered at Playwrights Horizons in 2019.
Byrd and her collaborators tested the boundaries of how low the light levels onstage could get while still allowing the audience to follow the action of the play, creating the visual effect of figures alternately emerging from and swallowed by darkness, as if balanced on the edge of an abyss.
Although some of the scenes were only three sentences long, we were able to use simple light to inform the audience to quickly discern a time jump, as well as the new physical and emotional space.
[2] In The New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham called Isabella Byrd "one artist whose lightscapes tend to linger in my mind" and described the way her lighting "exert[s] a strong but delicate harmonic influence" on the plays she designs.
[7] New York magazine's Sara Holdren described her design for Annie Baker's Infinite Life as "crisp, beautiful, and impressively funny.