Jennifer Tipton lighting designs

1958-2013

Jennifer Tipton (b. 1937) is an American lighting designer for dance, theater, opera, and art installation. She has worked on and Off-Broadway, as well as toured extensively throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. Many of her designs have been adapted and readapted for multiple stages. Tipton has taught theatrical lighting at the Yale School of Drama since 1981. Among her achievements are two Tony Awards for Best Lighting Design for Andrei Serban's production of The Cherry Orchard (1977), and for Jerome Robbins' Broadway (1989), for which she also won a Drama Desk Award. She has won two Henry Hewes Awards, an Olivier, the American Theatre Wing Award, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, the Jerome Robbins Prize, multiple Drama Desk Awards, and an OBIE for Sustained Achievement. Tipton was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2008.

After graduating from Cornell University in 1958, Tipton moved to New York City and began taking dance classes at the Martha Graham Studio. In the early 1960s, she joined The Merry-Go-Rounders, a small dance company for children, and soon became the group's assistant director. It was in this new role that Tipton's interest in stage lighting began, so she began coursework at Connecticut College with lighting designer Tom Skelton, with whom she later apprenticed. She soon began assisting Skelton with lighting for the Paul Taylor Dance Company, and eventually became the company's full-time lighting designer.

By the mid-1960s, Tipton was fully immersed in stage lighting, in both dance and theater. Over the next four decades, Tipton designed lighting for hundreds of dance productions, including shows for Marion Scott, The Joffrey Ballet, Twyla Tharp, American Ballet Theatre, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Jerome Robbins, Shen Wei, José Limón, Kazuko Harbiyashi, the Dance Theatre of Harlem, The San Francisco Ballet, and the National Ballet of Canada.

Tipton's Broadway debut was a 1969 revival of Our Town. Other Broadway credits include Murder Among Friends, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf, The Cherry Orchard, The Pirates of Penzance, Sophisticated Ladies, Singin' in the Rain, Jerome Robbins' Broadway, and James Joyce's The Dead. She has worked with the New York Shakespeare Festival, American Repertory Theatre (Mass.), the Yale Repertory Theatre, and Robert Wilson. In 1991, Tipton directed a production of The Tempest at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Among Tipton's opera credits are Agrippina, Alceste, Il Trovatore, and The Magic Flute. She has lighted shows at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Santa Fe Opera, the Royal Opera House in London, and the Glyndebourne Festival Opera.

Since the 1990s, Tipton has expanded her work to include more fine art and multimedia work. In 1996, she lit "Mine," an installation for artist Rona Pondick at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival. She has also worked with sculptor Robert Gober, and designed "Light Above the Hudson," a light installation for the Experimental Media Performing Arts Center building in Troy, New York. In 2010, Tipton collaborated with pianist Eteri Andjaparidze on "Spectral Scriabin," a multimedia light show featuring colored lights and the music of Alexander Scriabin.