Kev Kollmann caught the theatre bug early, seeing friends and family members take part in community theatre musicals and from two professional shows, Disney’s Lion King (touring) and Wicked on Broadway. In sixth grade, he played the part of Chip the tea cup in Beauty and the Beast at school, although the experience left him wanting to direct and actively participate in how the story was told, rather than perform. Whenever he saw a show he was curious about how they did some part of the staging or lighting, but he never thought theatre was a viable option for him. In high school he was discouraged from participating, because his mobility issues (Kollmann uses a wheelchair) seemed to present too many obstacles. Unlike in Disney shows, he gave up on his dreams and instead went to University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh to study chemistry with the idea of being a teacher. After encountering concerns that he would have trouble setting up labs, he switched to music and once again encountered problems physically playing all the required instruments. The moral of that story is, if you have to overcome a lot of obstacles, you might as well do it in pursuit of something you really care about.
After realizing that he really hadn’t let go of his love of the theatre, he went to the director of the theatre program, Jane Purse-Wiedenhoeft, and said, “I’ve had this conversation one too many times, but do you think I can do this?" Instead of getting caught up on the challenges, Purse-Wiedenhoeft replied, “We are creative people, we will figure it out.”
Although Kollmann’s major was focused on directing and stage managing, he says that one particular class was life changing. In Lighting and Sound, he loved the lighting and the next semester got to design his first show, Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid. He says, “I remember thinking if I was ever given the chance to do lighting again I would 100% take it,” but despite that success, he had been rebuffed so many times because of his physical disability he considered going into higher education.
The turning point for his doubts came when he was onstage with one of the designers at the school who said, “Look up. You see those lights onstage? Could you tell someone to point them at you?” Kollmann said yes, and the designer replied, “Well, you can be a designer then.”
At that point he had already been accepted for grad school at Northern Illinois University (NIU) and was unsure if he could change his major, so he emailed a lighting design professor to see if he could work on a production. The professor immediately emailed him back, told him he had space in his MFA program, and later, found him an assistantship.
The professor was Brandon Wardell, and Kollmann had found his tribe. He says, “I love being in the entertainment industry, I love doing what we do for an audience and making people smile, and I want to have a job that makes people smile.”
Once he started at the school, he met Tracy Nunnally who routinely makes people fly so didn't see too much of a problem dealing with physical limitations. “One of the first things he did was a walk around the building with me to see the venues and get to know the accessible routes. We found that in the big proscenium theatre, there is no way to get into the middle to tech a show. After several ideas, Nunnally said, ‘Tell me which row’ and we ended up ripping a row of seats out of the theatre.”
Students at NIU have the benefit of Electronic Theatre Controls and Upstaging close by, so they have consoles, fixtures and fog machines on loan and sometimes donated. Kollmann says, “I love playing around with things like Solo Spots and Mac Vipers and we got to learn to program on an ETC Ion.” Kollmann is also learning to program a grandMA3 on his PC.
He is still interested in teaching, in large part because he wants other students to see that a career in theatre is possible. He says, “I was always told no. I want to say, “Let’s figure it out.”
However, to make theatre more accessible to students with different abilities, some things need to change, and not just in venues. In terms of lighting control, he is having conversations with ETC and others in the industry to help rethink how consoles are designed.
“I want voice control, just like a computer, and whichever company starts working on this I want to be a tester,” he says. Since the technology already exists, it is a little frustrating that it hasn’t been adopted because as an option it could make life easier for everyone, disabled or not.
“Disabled people know a lot about technology because we use it in ways that it may not have been designed for, and for applications that no one really thinks about. We should be consulted because the technology to make consoles accessible already exists, it’s just that no one has thought about it.”
As an example, he says, “You could wear a mic and move around the theatre and program lighting remotely. We could use VR to program when there are parts of the theatre I just can’t get to, but in a VR environment I could see the stage from different seats and areas and see what might be missing. I want them to put a camera on a moving light so I can see where it is pointing. The tech exists, it’s just that no one thought about applying it in these situations.”
In conversations with manufacturers he has talked a lot about programming shows while finding it hard to reach buttons. “I’ve been working on a stream deck that people use for online content creation but using it as a light board. The keyboard shortcuts that I physically can’t do with my hands I have programmed into one button. If you think about it, it is making more options available to configure the console—which benefits everyone, not just me.”
Kollmann recently attended a conference in NYC on accessibility and during conversations with architects discovered that they are given a standard to follow in school to make rooms and buildings accessible, but never actually consulted users. “Having that conversation and bringing things to light was satisfying,” he says, “It is taking a long time, but it is happening. Bring us into the conversation!”
At the moment, he is still a student but working as much as possible as a production assistant and lighting assistant, and loving meeting people from all over and learning practical skills. Brandon Wardell continues to support him when he meets obstacles, and Tracy Nunnally continues to be a mentor. Mentorship is important for lots of reasons, not least because people who have been in the theatre a long time know about gear or workarounds that make it possible for him to do the job. “I don’t know what I don’t know, and sometimes there are easier ways to accomplish things.”
He has worked professionally as an assistant designer with Brandon Wardell
in The Paramount Theatre in Chicago on An Act Of God, which was well reviewed, and in addition to designing the lighting for the XLIVE stage at LDI 2024, he was the LD for the main stage at NATEAC last summer, lighting speakers and panelists.
He says, “I focus a light the exact same way that a Broadway lighting designer focuses a light.” Since we all use technology for almost every aspect of our lives, it seems strange Kollmann should be held back in his career for lack of a few adjustments which will benefit the whole community.
Reach out to Kev Kollmann here for design and assistant designer work and summer internships.