Live Design and LDI are pleased to announce that sound designer Natalie "Nat" Margaret Houle is the recipient of the 2025 USITT Rising Star Award. Established by LiveDesign/LDI in 2005, this annual award recognizes a young professional working in the disciplines of scenic, lighting, sound, or projection/video design. Houle will be honored during the 2025 USITT Conference & Stage Expo, in Columbus, Ohio, March 5-8, 2025.
Natalie "Nat" Margaret Houle is an LA-based sound designer, audio engineer, and composer born and raised in New York with nearly fifteen years of experience in audio that began at age thirteen. She recently graduated from the University of California, Irvine with an MFA in Sound Design. Her time at UCI culminated in the creation of her thesis, nmhspatial.com, the world’s first resource of its kind: an approachable product-agnostic analysis of object-based audio modalities explored through the theatrical sound designer’s lens. Alongside her research, Nat trained extensively on d&b Soundscape, L-Acoustics L-ISA, and Meyer Sound Spacemap Go, diving deep into how these modalities can transform storytelling and how sound designers can effectively engage with them. (And you should definitely ask her about that.) On the West Coast, she has worked either as designer or associate designer with Arizona Theatre Company, PCPA — Pacific Conservatory Theatre, Western Stage, Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, The Acting Company, Cal State Northridge, Cal State Los Angeles, INTUITV ARTSHIP, and Rubicon Theatre Company. Over the summer, Nat will teach sound design skills to pre-college students at UCLA for the Design Innovation Summer Institute. Nat is an active member of TSDCA, USITT, ANBC (Audio Nerd Book Club), and Soundgirls. Aside from moving sound around, she enjoys exploring California, sharing tea ceremonies with others, transcendental meditation, and yoga practice. She was a 2020 recipient of the Pat MacKay Diversity In Design Scholarship, sponsored by Live Design and LDI in conjunction with TSDCA and USITT.
“Natalie is a terrific designer in many ways, and I feel very lucky and grateful to have worked with her. She’s very organized and shows great initiative in coming up with solutions to problems before they arise. She’s one of the most friendly and easy-going people that I have ever worked with, and has excellent communication skills to easily interface with people, both on an artistic as well as on a technical level. She has a tremendous facility with a wide variety of technologies for music and sound design, both analog and digital, and she somehow manages to stay current on the latest developments in the field,” notes composer/sound designer Lindsay Jones.
Rising Star Award Winners 2005-2024
2024: William N. Lowe, sound designer
2023: Adam J. Thompson, video and graphic designer
2022: Kristin Martino, scenic designer
2021: Elizabet Puksto, scenic/production designer
2020: Joe Klug, live experience designer & producer
2019: Maranda DeBusk, lighting/projection designer
2018: Paige Hathaway, scenic designer
2017: Bryce Cutler, scenic & media designer
2016 Stephen Moss, lighting designer
2015 Chris Wood, lighting & sound designer
2014 Janie Bullard, sound designer
2013 Aaron Porter, lighting designer
2012 Jason Simms, scene designer
2011 Daniel Brodie, projection designer
2010 Ben Pilat, lighting designer
2009 Sean Savoie, lighting designer
2008 Elisheba Ittoop, sound designer
2007 John Horan, lighting designer
2006 Justin Townsend, lighting & scenic designer
2005 Kelly Hanson, scenic designer