The Nuckolls Fund for Lighting Education announced its largest single grant to date at its annual luncheon, held May 27 at Lightfair International in Las Vegas. The recipient--the first outside the United States--was the School of Interior Design at Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto.
The university is developing a comprehensive lighting design program that will be offered with its Center for Lighting Research and Design. Two courses are currently being offered; the $20,000 grant will enable the university to develop four more. One objective of the program, which will award a Certificate in Lighting Design, will be to fill the void for applied lighting design at the university level in Canada.
A special award of $5,000, that recognized the positive results achieved by a past grantee by extending its grant for an additional year, went to Texas Christian University to enable the continuation of its Lighting Designers in Residence series for the 1998-99 academic year. The series is presented as part of Lighting for Visual Presentation, a course established in 1996 with Nuckolls Fund support.
The Nuckolls Fund board of directors this year increased its annual grant from $10,000 to $20,000 in recognition of the fund's growth and ability to support more extensive funding. "It is especially gratifying to double our grant as we mark the fund's 10th anniversary," says fund president Jeffrey Milham. The fund was established in 1988 in memory of lighting designer and educator Jim Nuckolls.