guest teaching artist

I am a freelance lighting designer working to bring lighting into a variety of different educational environments. I specialize in making lighting programming and/or design more accessible and fun for those who it may not be their main focus. My goal is to create systems that work for the unique circumstances and continue to work well after I’m gone. I have taught one-on-one as well as in small and large groups. I believe in hands-on experience and real project situations to guide the learning. At the end of the day my goal is to create well-rounded artists that are also great collaborators and effective communicators. Below find some examples of my recent work in schools.

lIGHT BOARD pROGRAMMING

Denzel Washington School for the Arts is a performing arts high school with its own dedicated technical theater course. I worked with their existing technical theater teacher to help bring the students lighting knowledge into the 21st century. We learned the language of the light board and how to get the console to understand what artistic goals we were trying to accomplish. We also created systems that allowed for quicker, more efficient use of their console. Students became adept at programming their equipment and quickly began to train each other, as seen in this photo above.

lighting for dancers

Sarah Lawrence College offers a full year lighting design course for dancers about dance lighting design. In this course students receive hands on experience designing, programming and running lights for new works created in the choreography class. Through this class I aim to teach students not only the basic principles of lighting, but also how do we effectively communicate our ideas? What is our artistic intentions with each piece we create? What influences our work? How can we be better collaborators, no matter our role? Students leave this course with an appreciation for all members of their team, and many have gone on to do lighting along side their other artistic pursuits.

design intro for directors

Manhattan School of Music offers their first year musical theater majors an introduction to design. For the lighting section of this course, I focused on encouraging the actors to think like a director. How do we achieve visual unity? What common language do we all have as artists? How can we better communicate our ideas across disciplines? Using lighting design as a medium we explored all of these questions and more to help the students become more well-rounded artists. In the project from the photo above, students had to not only re-create the image in the stage simulator, but capture the mood and overall composition of their picture as well.