For more than two decades, I have used light to shape how performance is experienced in space and time. My path began in California’s Sierra Nevada foothills and led to New York City, where I have built a practice spanning theater, dance, opera, contemporary music, immersive environments, architectural installations, and large-scale experiential productions. I am drawn to work where light becomes structural, defining orientation, isolating bodies, and shaping the audience’s awareness of presence, distance, and time.
My earliest understanding of light came not only from theater, but from concert designers such as Roy Bennett and Baz Halpin, whose work revealed how light could move with the same emotional force as music itself, capable of tension, release, and transformation. At the same time, I was deeply influenced by theatrical traditions shaped by Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht, where light is allowed to withhold as much as it reveals, and meaning emerges through contrast, absence, and restraint. These dual influences continue to guide my approach, balancing atmosphere with precision, and spectacle with psychological intimacy.
A defining chapter of my career was my long association with Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, where lighting existed as part of the building itself. Moving through its shifting corridors and hidden rooms, audiences encountered light as something discovered rather than presented. Within that environment, I developed a visual language that guided, concealed, and disoriented, allowing each person to construct their own narrative through proximity and movement. That work reshaped my understanding of spatial storytelling and continues to inform how I approach immersive space.
My ongoing collaboration with Company XIV extends this exploration into a world shaped by sensuality, ritual, and the physical presence of performers. Together, we create environments where light remains inseparable from the body, revealing texture, breath, and motion while allowing darkness to remain active and expressive. The visual language emerges collectively, through sustained dialogue between choreography, music, space, and light, forming atmospheres that feel both intimate and suspended outside of ordinary time.
My work at Apple’s Steve Jobs Theater reflects another essential dimension of my practice, where light exists in exacting dialogue with architecture and material. In that space, even the smallest shifts in intensity or reflection can alter the emotional register of the environment. These projects have deepened my interest in light as an architectural medium, capable of shaping perception as profoundly as physical form.
Alongside these central collaborations, my work has extended across theater, opera, and interdisciplinary performance internationally. This has included Parable of the Sower, presented at Lincoln Center, and The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart with the National Theatre of Scotland, where lighting functioned as a primary narrative element. I have also designed productions and permanent theatrical systems for Norwegian Cruise Line, creating fully realized performance environments within the architecture of a ship, as well as experiential and architectural installations for sites such as Nemacolin Woodlands Resort. Across these varied contexts, I remain interested in how light can shape emotional space while remaining inseparable from the larger artistic whole.
I studied at Emerson College and began my career in New York’s experimental performance community, where constraint demanded clarity, invention, and trust in intuition. That foundation continues to inform my process. I approach each project as an act of listening, shaping light from within the work itself so that its emotional and spatial logic can emerge naturally. Light has the ability to reveal, to obscure, and to hold attention in suspension. It exists at the threshold between the visible and the felt, quietly shaping how a moment is remembered.
