Occasionally, a live event attracts an audience so filled with industry icons and celebrities that it almost, but not quite, overpowers the star power of the speaker. LDI2021’s session on Women In Lighting was such an event. Representing Women In Lighting, Anne Militello, internationally renowned lighting designer, founder and principal of Vortex Lighting, and head of the MFA program in lighting design at CalArts, hosted the session which was a hot ticket attended by Ken Billington, Clifton Taylor, Marsha Stern, Amy Lux, and Emily Bornt, among other designers and past students of the speaker.
The first part of Militello’s presentation detailed the women who forged a path in lighting design, from Loie Fuller and Jean Rosenthal to Shirley Pendergrast and Jennifer Tipton, generating input from Billington and others who had either met or acted as assistant LDs for many of the industry’s past luminaries. The second part of the session was a conversation with Paula Dinkel, the first principal in lighting design at Walt Disney Imagineering, and a leading figure in themed entertainment, as well as other areas of lighting design. Militello dubbed the conversation “Like The View but for lighting design,” and in a way it was, the conversation focused on overcoming obstacles and empowering women in the industry.
Dinkel got her bachelors and graduate degrees at California State University-Fullerton, near to the Disney park in Anaheim, but after graduation went on to teach. After seeing a job ad in Theatre Crafts Magazine, at that time owned by another empowering woman in the industry,Pat MacKay, and now in its latest iteration, Live Design, she applied to work at Disney. Six months later she was able to interview with Billy Crump and get a job as an Imagineer.
Dinkel says, “When I found the theatre, I felt like I was home. That’s where my heart was.” As part of a mentoring program through ETC she has some advice for women coming up in the industry. “People will tell young women you can’t do this. You can’t lift this 50 pound gear. Well, have you ever lifted a 50lb child? Of course you can do it! I say go for what you want. If someone says you can’t do something, say Just. Watch. Me.”
At Disney, Dinkel worked her way up, designing the Disney Store and Disney Quest, and eventually was able to take on larger projects like Euro Disney, using an all-female team including Tracy Eck and Laura Yates. She says, “We helped each other. We all had children and if one of us had to be home we covered for each other.” She calls their way of working “ground breaking” because at the time, men in the industry thought that if you had a child you couldn’t work.
Eventually, frustration drove her to ask management what it would take to make her a principal and the reply was that she would never be one. “That’s when I realized that I had to find my own pathway,” she says. Dinkel does have some good news for women in themed entertainment these days. She says, “Women carry a lot of weight in theme parks now, because they understand storytelling, and that is everything.”
The session ended on a high note when Militello invited some of the women lighting designers in the audience up on stage for a group photo.