Chris Parry to Lead Master Class on Lighting with Color and Gobos at USITT Conference

Tony- and Olivier-Award winning LD Chris Parry will lead the Rosco Master Class on lighting with color and gobos. This program, co-sponsored by the USITT Lighting Commission, has been scheduled for Thursday, March 18th at the Center Theatre adjacent to the Long Beach (CA) Convention Center. (The Convention Center is the headquarters for the USITT Annual Conference.)

Working with live instruments in the light lab of the USITT conference¸ Parry will show how he thinks about coloring and texturing stage light. His presentation shows how ordinary steel gobos can shape light in unexpected ways and how the latest glass gobos further enhance and even color light.

A native of Welsh Pool, England, Parry has 27 years of design experience on both sides of the Atlantic. His lighting for The Who¹s Tommy won the Tony Award in the US, the Olivier Award in the UK and the Dora Award in Canada. The same production won the Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and the LA Drama Critics Award. His designs for Not About Nightingales and Les Liaisons Dangereuses were both nominated for Tony Awards and won Drama Desk Awards.

In addition, Parry has designed for Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre in the UK. In the US, he has designed for the Los Angeles Opera, Houston Grand Opera, and such companies as the Guthrie Theatre, Hartford Stage, Seattle Repertory, Berkeley Repertory, A Contemporary Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, Alley Theatre, Ahmanson Theatre, Old Globe, La Jolla Playhouse and South Coast Repertory. An experienced educator and speaker, he is also professor and head of lighting design at the University of California, San Diego.

The Rosco Master Class has been a feature of the USITT Annual Conference for the past several years, led by such distinguished designers as Richard Pilbrow, Ken Billington, Kevin Rigdon, Beverly Emmons, and Allen Lee Hughes.