I am a lighting designer for theater, opera, dance and music, as well as an educator and an arts administrator. I have been a theater maker for thirty years, and am profoundly interested in how light, shadow and color impact emotion and reveal space and relationship. My design work is driven by a fascination with the space between human experience and our ability to express that experience in language. I am particularly curious about the ways in which our imaginations are populated in culturally specific ways.

In collaboration, I hope that theater can offer imaginative and provocative ways to investigate experience, that theater can be a venue for practicing inclusivity and radical welcome; and that it can be messy and surprising and complicated rather than tidy. As the Director of the Program in Theater and Music Theater at Princeton University for the last nine years, I am blessed to spend many of my days with younger humans who are trying to make sense of our world and themselves, and this work impacts my creative life immensely.

Recent design projects include lighting design for Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Appropriate directed by Lila Neugabeuer, for which I was awarded the Tony Award, the Drama Desk Award and the Henry Hewes Award for lighting in 2024; a co-design with Stacey Derosier for Michael R Jackson and Anna K. Jacob’s musical Teeth directed by Sarah Benson; for The Weir at the Abbey Theater in Dublin, Ireland; for Destiny of Desire directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson at the Old Globe. Recent producing projects include programming a Princeton festival around the show Felon - An American Washi Tale created and performed by Reginald Dwayne Betts; and advising and co-hosting the symposium Sound and Color: The Future of Race in Design at the Park Avenue Armory in collaboration with Tavia Nyong’o, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Mimi Lien and Mikaal Sulaiman.

My design and producing work has been enormously influenced by multi year collaborations with John Doyle, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Sam Gold, Elise Thoron, Bill Rauch, Shariffa Ali, Caitríona McLaughlin, a twenty five year collaboration with choreographer Monica Bill Barnes, and long term partnerships with my husband and conceptual artist Evan Alexander, and my co-pilot in all things theatrical and educational, the lighting designer Tess James.

I maintain personal and professional connections with Dublin and London; and have been teaching about light and theater design to anyone who will listen in various locations since 2007. In 2016 I became the director of the program in theater at Princeton University, where for five years I was also the artistic producing director of the theater and music theater program season. I became a Professor of the Practice at Princeton in 2021. More recently I became the co-director of the Fund for Irish Studies at Princeton University, where I am also a member of CreativeX, a collective of faculty in the arts and sciences committed to working collaboratively outside of the disciplines.

Other Broadway designs include Macbeth and King Lear (directed by Sam Gold), Jitney (directed by Ruben Santiago Hudson), Amelie (directed by Pam McKinnon), and Color Purple (directed by John Doyle).  Other designs include Assassins, Road Show and Pacific Overtures directed by John Doyle, Between the World and Me at the Apollo Theater in Harlem (adapted from the book by Ta-Nehisi Coates and directed by Kamilah Forbes), The Secret Life of Bees and Othello (directed by Sam Gold), Fefu and Her Friends (directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz); Roe (directed by Bill Rauch) and Hamlet directed by Lyndsey Turner (with Benedict Cumberbatch) at the Barbican in London, as well as The Marriage of Figaro, Cosi and Don Giovanni directed by Michael Cavanagh at San Francisco Opera.

I have been enjoyed being nominated for four Tony awards for work on Appropriate (won), Macbeth, Jitney and Machinal (directed by Lyndsey Turner) and for four Drama Desks for work on Appropriate (won), Color Purple, Machinal and Passion. In 2016 I was awarded the Ruth Morley Design Award from the League of Professional Theater Women; and in 2025 and 2013 I won the Henry Hewes design award for lighting (in 2013 for my work on Annie Baker's The Flick, directed by Sam Gold).

I have been a company member of Monica Bill Barnes & Company for more than twenty-five years, whose motto “bringing dance where it doesn’t belong” has brought us collaborations with Ira Glass and Maira Kalman and the students of Hunter College, venues such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brookfield shopping mall, and time with dancers between the ages of twelve and eighty-five.