I spent my early career in NYC where I came up in the lively experimental theater scene. I worked for many years with the New York theatre company Mabou Mines as Lighting Designer, Production Manager, Stage Manager, Performer, and Assistant Director. Other jobs collaborations and jobs were with The Performing Garage, Playwright’s Horizons, 6 years as Route Lighting Designer for New York’s Village Halloween Parade under the direction of Ralph Lee. Lighting design credits include work at the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Goodman Theatre, and at the Mark Taper Forum. I began to work internationally with lighting work in Berlin, Bologna, Florence, Milan, London, Grenada, Geneva, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, Brussels, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Hong Kong, at the Bristol Old Vic, the Theatre Academy in Tampere, Finland, and at the International Theatre Festival in Havana, Cuba. I spent much of the last decade touring both domestically and internationally with Vermont’s Sandglass Theater. as the lighting designer for their production of D-GENERATION: An Exaltation of Larks, and their most recent creation “FLUSHING (Make Room for Someone Else).” I serve as the Resident Lighting Designer at the Ko Festival of Performance in Amherst, MA and for both the theatre and dance programs at Springfield College.
I have had extensive experience as a lighting designer for dance/movement theatre, working with many choreographers including Sarah Zehender, Tatiana Desardouin, Kirstie Simpson, Laurie Booth, Alan Franco, Darrell Grand Moultrie, Jennifer Pollins, Monica Bill Barnes, and David Dorfman, Quest Visual Theatre and Beau Jeste Moving Theatre. Lighting for puppet theatre is a current passion and I am at work on an article about the ways in which puppets are not people and require different lighting techniques.
My directing work, primarily original pieces, has been seen in New York, Berlin and throughout New England. I directed CRAVINGS: Songs of Hunger and Satisfaction, that premiered at the 2008 Ko Festival and then went on on to a three-week, sold-out run at the Central Square Theatre in Cambridge, MA, where it garnered a nomination for an IRNE Award. It then continued on to tour throughout the US. Other directing credits include working with Laurie McCants, winner of a prestigious Fox Fellowship to create her first solo piece, INDUSTRIOUS ANGELS, which has toured to multiple venues in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.
The bulk of my work as producer/presenter has been with the Ko Festival of Performance, an organization I co-founded in 1991. I served on the Editorial Board of Theatre Topics. I was also on the Lighting Commission of the United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT), for whom I headed their Portfolio Review program. I also served as USITT’s international representative to the Lighting Design Working Group of OISTAT, the international parent body of USITT. In addition, I have served on a N.E.H. panel, the “New Forms” panel for Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the NEA/TCG Career Development Program for Designers panel and the “Dramatic Writing” panel for the Massachusetts Cultural Council. I holds a B.A. from Hampshire College and double M.F.A. in Directing and Lighting Design from the UMASS/Amherst. I has been on the faculties of Hampshire, Williams and Trinity Colleges, and Long Island University, and served as the Program Director of the M.F.A. Theatre Program at Towson University for 2006-7. I am currently the Theatre Mentor for Valley Arts Mentors. I regularly offer performance trainings to the youth members of the Performance Project’s “First Generation” Ensemble, and offer lighting workshops for first time and beginning choreographers on how to collaborate with lighting designers.
I am a member of the Network of Ensemble Theaters, and served as their Membership Associate, as well as two terms on the Board of Directors.
