# 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.
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 a Caryl Churchill play, an experience she found to be "like music, only in a visual medium." She studied abroad at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she was mentored by American lighting designer Penny Remson.
After relocating to the United States, Cox worked odd jobs, including as a theater electrician at Hartford Stage, before pursuing graduate studies at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. At NYU, Cox studied with lighting designer John Gleason. She graduated in 1998 with an MFA in lighting design. She credits another member of the NYU faculty, Susan Hilferty, with helping her get her first professional design job after graduate school. In 2001, Cox was accepted into the National Endowment for the Arts/Theater Communications Group Career Development Program for promising early-career artists.

## 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 the musical adaptation of Amélie. She has also worked off-Broadway and at regional theatres across the United States. Internationally, her work has been seen at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and the National Theatre in London.
Her major collaborators include the directors Sam Gold and John Doyle, the choreographer Monica Bill Barnes. 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."
She has a great interest in color, and favors a palette of greens, golds, and yellows. Cox has cited painters William John Leech and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as major influences on her use of color, as well as the work of light and space artist James Turrell.
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 Georges Seurat's monochromatic preparatory sketches as a major inspiration.
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.

### Appropriate

Cox's lighting design for Second Stage Theater'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 Theatre. 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.
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. They worked backward from there to draw out a stage picture for the rest of the play, one characterized by obscurity and claustrophobia.
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. Cox dedicated her Tony win to "all the patient partners and children of theater-makers everywhere."

### Critical reception

The New York Times has described Cox's work as "painterly" and "eye-teasing". Critic Jesse Green called her work for Annie Baker's The Flick at Playwrights Horizons "almost orgasmically expressive." In Variety, her lighting for a National Theatre production of Hamlet starring Benedict Cumberbatch was compared to "sumptuous cinematography."

## Awards and nominations

| Year | Production | Award | Category | Outcome |
| 2024 | Appropriate | Tony Award | Best Lighting Design of a Play | Won |
| 2024 | Appropriate | 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 | Ruth Morley Design Award | Ruth Morley Design Award | Won |
| 2014 | Machinal | Tony Award | Best Lighting Design of a Play | Nominated |
| 2014 | Machinal | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Lighting Design | Nominated |
| 2013 | Passion | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Lighting Design | Nominated |
| 2013 | The Flick | Henry Hewes Design Award | | Won |

## Other work

Since 2016, Jane Cox has been the director of the Program in Theater and Music Theater at Princeton University. She has been on the Princeton faculty since 2007. Cox has also taught at NYU Tisch, UMass Amherst, Vassar College, and Sarah Lawrence College.
Cox has worked as a producer and arts administrator. in 2020, she was one of the founding members of Design Action, a coalition of theater designers organized against racial inequity in theater design and advocating for change in the theater industry. As part of her work with Design Action, Cox was one of the co-organizers of the Park Avenue Armory's 2023 symposium event "Sound & Color: The Future of Race in Design" alongside fellow theater artists Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Mimi Lien, and Mikaal Sulaiman, and curator Tavia Nyong'o. The event was partly inspired by a class that Cox had co-taught at Princeton with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, focused on race and lighting design.

## Personal life

Cox lives in Princeton, New Jersey. She is married to designer Evan Alexander, with whom she has a daughter, Becket.