Weston Gaylord is a writer and mixed-reality creative technologist based in Los Angeles. His original work often combines live performance, music, and virtual & augmented reality.
Weston was selected as a member of the 2021/22 Geffen Playhouse Writers’ Room, developing a new full-length play that was presented as a staged reading in Winter 2022. He was also a recipient of the Humanitas Prize PLAY LA fellowship in 2020 and a member of the Vagrancy Writers' Group in 2021. His play A Long Time Coming was a winner of the Ashland New Plays Festival, and presented as a staged reading series in Fall 2023.
He co-wrote and developed Chained: A Victorian Nightmare, bringing together real-time motion capture, room-scale VR, and immersive theater for a new adaptation of Dickens’ classic ghost story. Chained premiered at a custom-built installation in LA in 2018 and was later featured at the Future of Storytelling festival in New York.
Weston co-wrote Gravity: A New(tonian) Musical with Joel Chapman, Matt Herrero, Jessia Hoffman and Ken Savage. Gravity was a finalist for the O'Neill National Musical Theater Conference in 2017, and has had staged readings at the Brava Theatre, TheatreWorks New Works Festival, and at Z Space’s Z Below venue, with support from SF BATCO, Encore Theatre Company and the Stanford Arts Institute.
As a creative technologist for VR studio Here Be Dragons, Weston dug deep on creative development, on-set production, and post-production R&D. He has captured VR with Google Jump, Insta360 Pro, Nokia OZO, Facebook 360Surround, Samsung Gear360, and custom rigs, and has helped create narrative content for stereoscopic 360 video, realtime rendering, roomscale photogrammetry, and live performance integrating augmented reality from Microsoft Hololens.
His writing has also been featured at the Cannes Film Festival, Games For Change, A Little New Music, and San Jose Repertory Theatre’s Emerging Artists Lab.
Weston has studied playwriting with Amy Freed and puppetry with Basil Twist. He holds a B.S. from Stanford University in Symbolic Systems, with a focus in Human-Computer Interaction.