“Gods of the Vikings” Exhibit
Immersive Gallery
EPCOT, Walt Disney World Resort
© Disney
How do you make ancient mythology feel immediate and experiential?
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Gods of the Vikings brought the mythology, legends, and larger-than-life characters of Norse culture into a guest-facing exhibition experience.
The opportunity was to take a subject rooted in ancient stories and create an environment that felt immersive, accessible, and visually compelling—giving guests a reason to explore the mythology rather than simply read about it.
The experience brought together storytelling, environmental design, graphics, artifacts, and interpretive moments to create a journey through the world of the Viking gods.
Rather than treating the mythology as a collection of facts, the exhibit invited guests to step into the stories themselves.
DESIGN CHALLENGE
Norse mythology comes with centuries of stories, characters, symbols, and cultural context.
The challenge was to distill that material into an experience that guests could understand and enjoy while preserving the richness of the source material.
That meant thinking about the exhibit as a complete narrative journey:
STORY
How do you introduce an unfamiliar mythology and make guests want to know more?
CHARACTERS
How can gods, heroes, creatures, and legends become part of the physical experience?
INTERPRETATION
How do you make complex information accessible without flattening the story?
ENVIRONMENT
How can the physical setting establish a sense of time, place, and atmosphere?
GUEST JOURNEY
How should information and storytelling unfold as guests move through the exhibit?
The goal wasn’t simply to tell guests about the Vikings.
It was to give them a doorway into the world of the Vikings.
MY ROLE
DESIGNING FROM THE PLAN
The Gods of the Vikings gallery was a new exhibition fitted into an existing gallery space at EPCOT, which meant the experience had to be carefully planned around an established footprint and existing visitor flow.
I used architectural and exhibition plans to map the story onto the space, considering how the narrative would unfold as guests moved through the gallery. I reviewed layouts and elevations to understand available wall space, sightlines, exhibit locations, and the relationships between artifacts, graphics, and interpretive content.
The plans became another creative tool—not simply a way to understand the space, but a way to test the experience spatially.
I considered not only what guests would learn, but when they would encounter each piece of the story, how information would be introduced, and how each element could lead them toward the next.
I collaborated with creative, design, gallery, and technical teams as the exhibition took shape, helping balance the needs of the existing space with the requirements of the new experience.
The goal was to make thoughtful use of the gallery while creating a cohesive physical journey through the mythology.
CREATING THE STORY & GUEST EXPERIENCE
As Story Lead for Gods of the Vikings, I helped shape the narrative and guest experience for this EPCOT exhibition exploring Norse mythology and the gods of the Viking world.
I developed the storytelling approach for the gallery, considering how to make complex mythology accessible and engaging for EPCOT guests. Rather than presenting the information as a collection of isolated facts, I looked at how the stories, characters, artifacts, and interpretive elements could work together to create a narrative guests could discover as they moved through the exhibition.
I worked with the creative and design teams to determine what guests should encounter, what they should understand, and how the story should unfold from one part of the gallery to the next.
This included developing and refining interpretive content while considering how the written story would work alongside the physical exhibition elements.
Because the gallery was being created within an existing space, the guest experience had to be both narratively cohesive and spatially intentional.
I helped connect the mythology, artifacts, environmental storytelling, and guest journey into one experience that invited guests to explore the world of the Norse gods.
RESULT
Gods of the Vikings transformed mythology and historical storytelling into a multidimensional guest experience, connecting narrative, interpretation, environmental design, and visual storytelling.
The exhibit allowed guests to encounter the mythology through multiple layers—moving from information and interpretation into a larger sense of atmosphere, character, and story.
For me, the project demonstrates how narrative can become an organizing principle for physical design.
When story, graphics, objects, and environment are developed together, an exhibit can become more than a collection of information.
The story creates the journey.
The environment creates the world.
The details invite discovery.