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Jane Cox (lighting designer)
Jane Cox is an Irish lighting designer. She has been nominated for four Tony Awards, and won the 2024 Tony for Best Lighting Design of a Play for her work on Appropriate. She teaches at Princeton University.
Early life and education
Jane Cox is from Dublin, Ireland. Her parents had moved there from the north of England; her mother worked for Amnesty International Ireland and her father was a professor at Trinity College.[1]
Cox studied flute at the University of London before changing her major to theatre. She worked as a light board operator on an undergraduate production of Caryl Churchill's Oh! What a Lovely War, an experience she has described as being "like music, only in a visual medium."[2] She studied abroad at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she was mentored by American lighting designer Penny Remson.[3]
After relocating to the United States, Cox worked odd jobs, including as a theater electrician at Hartford Stage, before pursuing graduate studies.[2] She graduated from New York University Tisch School of the Arts in 1998 with an MFA in lighting design.[4][5]
Lighting design
Over the course of a decades-long career, Cox has designed theatre, opera, and dance productions in the United States and internationally. She has an extensive list of Broadway credits, including Macbeth (2022), which starred Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga, and Amelie.[6][5] She has also worked off-Broadway and at regional theatres across the United States.[7] Internationally, her work has been seen at the Abbey Theater in Dublin and the National Theater in London.[1]
Her major collaborators include the directors Sam Gold and John Doyle, the choreographer Monical Bill Barnes, [2] Lighting designers Isabella Byrd and Stacey Derosier worked with her early in their careers in the role of associate designer.
Cox has described her design process as beginning with the show's text or musical score, which she reads or listens to several times before beginning creative discussions with the director and other collaborators. She sees lighting in a live performance setting as a way to craft atmosphere and invoke certain feelings, as well as to direct the audience's attention. She describes herself as "primarily fascinated with how much light and shadow can be used to reveal and to hide a human being onstage...the audience's relationship to their own imaginations shifts as stage information is hidden and revealed."[7]
She has a great interest in color, and favors a palette of greens, golds, and yellows. Cox has cited painters William John Leech and Toulouse Lautrec as major influences on her use of color, as well as the work of light and space artist James Turrell.[2]
In 2017, Cox designed Sunday in the Park with George at the Guthrie Theater, directed by Joseph Haj. In an interview, she framed her work in relationship to the musical's interest in the way light and color are rendered in painting, and described the play of light and shadow in George Seurat's monochromatic preparatory sketches as a major inspiration.[8]
In 2022's Broadway production of Macbeth, Cox and director Sam Gold drew creative inspiration from a comparison between theater craft and witchcraft. They chose a heavily saturated color palette influenced by horror films, feminist artists like Judy Chicago, and the band Pussy Riot's punk-activist spectacles. In the production, the actors operated custom-built portable fog machines and handheld lighting instruments to shape the atmosphere onstage.[6]
Appropriate
Cox's lighting design for Second Stage's 2023 production of Appropriate won the Tony Award for Best Lighting Design of a Play, as well as a Drama Desk Award. The show, by playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, opened at the Helen Hayes Theater in December and later moved to the Belasco. It was directed by Lila Neugebauer, and the creative team included the scenic design collective dots, costume designer Dede Ayite, and sound design by Will Pickens and Bray Poor.[7]
Cox and Neugebauer developed a design concept by first focusing on the play's third-act coup de theatre, which requires the house at the heart of the play's plot to decay before the audience's eyes in a sped-up manner akin to time-lapse photography. Cox described the sequence as "chang[ing] days hundreds of times in quick succession," which required the programming of hundreds of cues that culminate in a strobing effect.[9] They worked backward from there to draw out a stage picture for the rest of the play, one characterized by obscurity and claustrophobia.[7]
Cox's attire for the 2024 Tony Awards was inspired by the soundscape of cicada song that scores the play's transitions. She wore a custom-made dress with a prominent cicada print, as well as a cicada pendant necklace.[10] Cox dedicated her Tony win to "all the patient partners and children of theater-makers everywhere."[11]
Critical reception
The New York Times has described Cox's work as "painterly"
Awards and nominations
| Year | Production | Award | Category | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Appropriate | Tony Award | Best Lighting Design of a Play | Won |
| Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Lighting Design | Won | ||
| 2022 | Macbeth | Tony Award | Best Lighting Design of a Play | Nominated |
| 2019 | The Secret Life of Bees | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Lighting Design | Nominated |
| 2017 | Jitney | Tony Award | Best Lighting Design of a Play | Nominated |
| 2016 | The Color Purple | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Lighting Design of a Musical | Nominated |
| 2016 | Ruth Morley Design Award | Won | ||
| 2014 | Machinal | Tony Award | Best Lighting Design of a Play | Nominated |
| Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Lighting Design | Nominated | ||
| 2013 | Passion | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Lighting Design | Nominated |
| The Flick | Henry Hewes Design Award | Won |
Other work
Jane Cox is the director of the Program in Theater and Music Theater at Princeton University, where she has been on the faculty since 2007. Cox has also taught at NYU Tisch, UMass Amherst, Vassar College, Sarah Lawrence College.[1]
Cox has worked as a producer and arts administrator.[4]
Personal life
Cox lives in Princeton, New Jersey.[4] She is married to designer Evan Alexander, with whom she has a daughter, Becket.[1]
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| Year | Production | Award | Category | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Appropriate | Tony Award | Best Lighting Design of a Play | Won |
| Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Lighting Design of a Play | Won | ||
| 2022 | Macbeth | Tony Award | Best Lighting Design of a Play | Nominated |
| 2017 | Jitney | Tony Award | Best Lighting Design of a Play | Nominated |
- ^ a b c d "Lit From Within | Princeton Magazine". Retrieved 2024-12-31.
- ^ a b c d "An Interview with Jane Cox" (PDF). City Theatrical. 2020. Retrieved December 30, 2024.
- ^ "Jane Cox wins a Tony Award for Lighting Design on Appropriate : Theater : UMass Amherst". www.umass.edu. Retrieved 2024-12-31.
- ^ a b c "Tony Awards 2024: Daniel Radcliffe and Irish lighting designer Jane Cox among the winners". The Irish Times. Retrieved 2024-12-31.
- ^ a b Communications, NYU Web. "Alumni @ Work: Jane Cox Lights Up Broadway". www.nyu.edu. Retrieved 2024-12-31.
- ^ a b Kinnersley, Hannah (2022-12-29). "31 Days Of Plots: Jane Cox—Macbeth | Live Design Online". www.livedesignonline.com. Retrieved 2024-12-31.
- ^ a b c d Lampert-Greaux, Ellen (2024-06-26). "An Appropriate Balance Of Light And Shadow | Live Design Online". www.livedesignonline.com. Retrieved 2024-12-31.
- ^ "Sunday In The Park With Jane Cox". spectrum.rosco.com. Retrieved 2024-12-31.
- ^ "Jane Cox's Tony Award-winning Lighting Design uses ETC to Illuminate the Darkness of Appropriate". www.etcconnect.com. Archived from the original on 2024-09-07. Retrieved 2024-12-31.
- ^ Runk, Steve (2024-06-17). "Jane Cox wins Tony Award!". Lewis Center for the Arts. Retrieved 2024-12-31.
- ^ The Tony Awards (2024-06-20). Jane Cox | 2024 Tony Awards Acceptance Speeches. Retrieved 2024-12-31 – via YouTube.