Jaymi Lee Smith
Lighting Design

My career has always lived between two worlds, the rehearsal hall and the classroom. For more than twenty years I have designed lighting for theaters across the country while teaching and mentoring artists at the University of California, Irvine, where I serve as Interim Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate Division and Head of Lighting Design. The connection between those two roles keeps me centered. The energy of storytelling onstage feeds my work with students, and their curiosity keeps my own creative fire alive.

I think of theater as a landscape of visual noise. Everything onstage adds to the composition, and it is the lighting designer’s task to shape that orchestra of tone and silence. Light can invite the audience to lean forward into the intimacy of a single voice or to lean back as the stage bursts open with movement and color. At South Coast Repertory, in the poetic energy of Vietgone and the clear precision of Photograph 51, I found how light moves like memory. At The Alley Theatre, in The Nether and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I explored how it makes the unseen visible. At Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, from A Chorus Line to A Christmas Carol, I learned how light opens the heart of a story.

In every project, I return to the same goal: to listen deeply, collaborate fully, and craft light that tells the truth of a moment.