His notable works include Prometheus Bound, The Master Builder, Al gran sole carico d'amore, Macbeth, the opening gala performance at Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, and King Lear.

[citation needed] Preston joined Robert Brustein for the founding of the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard, where he served as Associate Artist until 1990.

[6] The performance featured Emmy award winner Ron Cephas Jones in the role of Prometheus, and Mirjana Joković as Io.

For the play, he and set designer Efren Delgadillo Jr, employed a 23-foot-tall rotating steel wheel symbolizing time and representing the protagonist being bound to a mountaintop, as per the Greek tragedy.

Using the physical/gestural techniques he developed as a basis, Preston devised a wide ranging series of works that expanded the discourse and practice of contemporary performance creation.

These included Paradise Bound: Part II,[14] a spectacle with 100 performers mounted at the Central Park bandshell in New York that involved a chorus of boom boxes “conducted” in an urban ritual of radio cacophony; Woyzeck/Nosferatu (Samuel Beckett Theater, NYC), a meditation on silent cinema and hypnosis; Apocrypha at Cucaracha in New York in 1995, an oratorio based on the Gnostic Gospels: Democracy in America, based on Alexis de Tocqueville's work of the same name, created together with Colette Brooks for the Yale Repertory Theatre.

As part of Copenhagen's activities as Cultural City of Europe, Travis Preston directed Lulu by Alban Berg - a co-operation between the Danish National Symphony, the Lille Grønnegåde Theater, and the royal family of Denmark, performed in the Queen's riding stables of Christiansborg Palace.