About
For those of you I don’t know or don’t know well, I am a Philadelphia-based lighting designer, educator and organizer whose design work focuses on new American plays and musicals, contemporary dance and site-specific performance. I believe that design is dramaturgy and am interested in how the generative text for work can be found in movement as much as in language. My work expresses emotional narratives through light as an ephemeral and time-based medium. I use she/her pronouns. I love musicals.
Recent collaborations include: Cost of Living at Philadelphia Theatre Company; The Wanderers at City Theatre Company; Backing Track at the Arden; The Sorceress for the National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene; Dionysus Was Such a Nice Man at the Wilma; Rachel and Awake and Sing, both at Quintessence Theater Group; and The undergird choreographed by Meg Foley. My most recent collaboration with choreographer Meg Foley, FIXING, premiered at the site-specific performance festival FORMATIONS at the 2019 Prague Quadrennial. I have had many longtime artistic homes, and one of the longest is Target Margin Theater, of which I am an Associate Artist.
I am the full time staff organizer for United Scenic Artists / IATSE Local USA 829, for whom I served as the Secretary/Treasurer of the Eastern Region. I aim to advocate for transparency, inclusion and deepened organizing within the union and community. I am currently part of the NYS AFL-CIO/Cornell Workers’ Institute Union Leadership Institute, Class of 2022.
From 2017-2023, I was the Program Director of Theater Design & Technology in the Ira Brind School of Theater Arts at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. At the 2019 Prague Quadrennial, I was invited to speak on a panel entitled “Pedagogy: Conversations about teaching of performance design: views, perspectives and evolutions.” Since then I have been leading workshops to help educators engage with design students by deconstructing the traditional capitalist, hierarchical, ego-driven collaborative structure. Previously, I have been a faculty member or guest artist at Bard College, Muhlenberg College, Hofstra University, the University of New Haven, NYU/Tisch, Brooklyn College, the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab, as a Visiting Lecturer in Theater at Williams College, and as the Visiting Assistant Professor of Performance Design and Technology at Alfred University.
I am passionate about producing and, as often happens with lighting designers, I am sometimes a production manager, which is, in my mind, a producing role. To that end, I have been the Production Manager of Applied Mechanics and the Associate Producer and a founding company member of Polybe + Seats. I was the production manager and then associate producer of American Realness, a festival of contemporary performance curated by Ben Pryor/tbspMGMT, from 2010-2015. I also have extensive production management experience on dance and theater projects throughout the US and internationally.
I have also been a contributing writer for Live Design and Stage Directions.
BA: Columbia. MFA: NYU/Tisch. Member: United Scenic Artists IATSE Local USA 829.
International Touring includes:
Gothenburg Danse and Theater Festival, Gothenburg, Sweden; TAP/Poitiers, Poitiers, France; Opera de Lille, Lille, France; Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt, Germany; The Next Festival, Kortrijk, Belgium; La Bâtie Festival, Geneva, Switzerland; Black Box Teater, Oslo, Norway; Steirischer Herbst, Graz, Austria; Latitudes Contemporaines, Lille, France; Pavilion Noir, Aix-en-Provence, France; Theatre Garonne, Toulouse, France; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Theatre Pole Sud, Strasbourg, France; Rote Fabrik, Zurich, Switzerland; Norwich/Norfolk Festival, Norwich, UK; Queer Up North, Manchester, UK