Jennifer Tipton

Well-known for lighting theater, opera, and dance, Jennifer Tipton was born in Columbus, Ohio and attended Cornell University where she majored in English.  After graduation, Tipton came to New York to study dance.  Her interest in lighting began with a course in the subject at the American Dance Festival, Connecticut College.

Tipton has been awarded two Bessie Awards and a Laurence Olivier Award for lighting dance; her work in that field includes pieces choreographed by Mikhail Baryshnikov, Jiří Kylián, Dana Reitz, Jerome Robbins, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, Dan Wagoner, and Trisha Brown, among many others.  Her work in the theatre has garnered a Joseph Jefferson Award, a Kudo, a Drama-League Award, two American Theatre Wing Awards, an Obie, two Drama Desk Awards (the first for The Cherry Orchard and Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf; the second for Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, Waiting for Godot, and Long Day’s Journey into Night), and two Tony Awards® for The Cherry Orchard and Jerome Robbins’ Broadway.  Her work in opera includes Richard Jones’s production of Hansel und Gretel and David McVicar’s production of Il Trovatore, both at the Metropolitan Opera, as well as Aida, directed by David McVicar at the Royal Opera House in London.  In the fall of 1991 she directed a production of The Tempest at the Guthrie. Her recent work includes Pictures from Home and To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway, Samuel Beckett’s First Love for Zoom, and all of Richard Nelson’s Rhinebeck plays, a remount of Richard Strauss’s Electra for the Dallas Opera, Amy Hall Garner’s Somewhere in the Middle for the Paul Taylor Dance Company, and Jerome Robbins for the Paris Opera Ballet. She created her own installation, Our Days and Night at the Baryshnikov Arts Center.

Tipton has been an artistic associate with the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge and the Goodman Theatre in Chicago.  In 1982, she received the Creative Arts Award in Dance from Brandeis University.  She held a Guggenheim Fellowship for the 1986-87 season and received the 1989 Commonwealth Award in Dramatic Arts.  In 1991, she received a Dance Magazine Award.  She has been a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Theatre Program Distinguished Artist Award, and a grant in the National Theatre Artist Residency Program funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.  She received the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 2001, the Jerome Robbins Prize in 2003 and the Mayor’s Award for Arts and Culture in New York City in April 2004.  In 2008, she became the United States Artists Gracie Fellow and a MacArthur Fellow.  Tipton is a Professor Emeritus in the Practice of Design at David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University and the Yale Repertory Theatre Lighting Design Advisor.

Tipton’s lighting has been represented in American Ballet Theatre’s repertory since A Soldier’s Tale in 1971.  Among many ballets in the Company’s repertory that she has lit are Amnon V’Tamar, Bach Partita, Le Baiser de la Fée, Ballet Imperial, Brief Fling, Bruch Violin Concerto No.1, Bum’s Rush, Crime and Punishment, Don Quixote (Kitri’s Wedding), Eccentrique, The Elements, Enough Said, Everlast, Field, Chair and Mountain, Gala Performance, A Gathering of Ghosts, Giselle, The Informer, Interludes, Intermezzo, The Leaves are Fading, Mikhail Baryshnikov’s production of The Nutcracker, Alexei Ratmansky’s production of The Nutcracker, The Other, Push Comes to Shove, Raymonda, Grand Pas Hongrois, Sinatra Suite, Stravinsky Violin Concerto, Sunset, and Theatre.