in 1: the podcast: The podcast is back from a long hiatus for (hopefully!) an all new batch of episodes. This week, we are sitting down with Lighting Designer and recent Obie Award winner Isabella Byrd. Isabella discuses with us the genesis of her design for ‘The Light Shining in Buckinghamshire’ and how that show helped catapult her into greater visibility.
2 comments:
Isabella Byrd is such an interesting human being. Also, I am now going to follow this podcast because of this post. I loved this interview. She is so wonderful. The fact that the start of her career was through Linkedin. Is that not wild or what? It’s also funny to hear the strange means in which the New York Theatre Workshop went about hiring Isabella. It’s crazy to think about how long she had been assisting, than get a great opportunity to just design a show. The push for diversity on design teams is great. I loved how the interviewer touched on diversity. I think Isabella is genuinely talented and the push for diversity could’ve helped her career but it did not make it happen. It’s just all the right elements at all the right times. The discussion about a job being given to certain people and taking a job is “for the right reasons.”
I love Isabella Byrd. She is such a kind and friendly designer in person. I had the chance to see her tech Tale Of Desperaux at The Old Globe Theater and she was so kind to answer all my questions, show and explain to me her magic sheet and light plot, and to get an extra com headset so I could listen to her talk to the in-house programmer. From her previous work that I have seen, it all looks very interesting and has nice casted shadows. In Tale of Desperaux, Isabella's design was pretty dark overall in my opinion but it worked very well for the different scenes. She tried to create an environment that a mouse would go in rather than a person. In the scenes when it was clearly a well-lit room with humans interacting in it (rather than the tiny mice or rats), the scene was more brightly lit. Her design process was great to witness in person and I am glad to share the experience of watching her tech.
-Pablo Anton
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