He has a work ethic that would impress Thomas Edison. Starting in 1997 as an intern at the Williamstown Theater Festival, he said, he had the weakest drawings skills and keenest ambition of any of his peers. Five years later, he was directing the design program.

In 2001, he and Carolyn Cantor founded the Edge Theater Company in New York. One of his feats was putting an actor belly down on a skateboard and sending him off to perform as a shark.

Part of what distinguishes his set designs is the cathartic use of space.

In “Dear Evan Hansen,” for example, the musical about adolescent anxiety and mendacity, Mr. Korins suspended computer monitors to create a dark, pseudosocial atmosphere of crawling digital texts and images. Only in the last scene did he treat the audience to a much-needed breath of sky.

Jeffrey Seller, the lead producer of “Hamilton,” recalled seeing Mr. Korins’s set for the rock musical “Passing Strange” at the Public Theater in 2007: a white curtain pulled back to reveal a wall of gridded neon light. “It surprised me in a way to win my love,” Mr. Seller said.

For “Hamilton,” Mr. Korins introduced the turntable that dominates the stage as a metaphor for the whirlwind of 18th-century American politics. That set earned him his first Tony nomination.