Lighting Designer Suzan Tillotson to Present Lecture on March 9

Photo by Iwan Baan

The Wyly Theatre lobby, at the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Suzan Tillotson will present a lecture titled "Exploring the Creative Process through Lighting Design" at 5 p.m. Monday, March 9, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall, on the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville, as part of the Fay Jones School of Architecture lecture series.

Tillotson founded Tillotson Design Associates in 2004, with 23 years of lighting design experience. She received a Bachelor of Interior Design from the Louisiana State University School of Architecture. After graduation, she worked for Levy-Kramer Associates, a 35-person engineering firm, where she served as head of the lighting department. In 1986, she relocated to New York City and acquired additional experience at Flack + Kurtz Engineers and at H.M. Brandston and Partners before joining Jerry Kugler. Tillotson and Kugler later formed Kugler Tillotson Associates. She has won more than 40 lighting design awards for her work and has been featured in many national and international publications.

Tillotson has been a member of the Illuminating Engineering Society for more than 30 years and served as president of the Southwest Louisiana Section. She is a former member of the Board of Directors for the International Association of Lighting Designers and was the past New York Area Regional Coordinator for IALD. Tillotson has also served as an awards judge for IESNYC Lumen Awards and the IALD Awards.

She has taught the New York IES Introductory Lighting course, as well as numerous lighting design and rendering workshops. She has guest lectured on lighting design at Louisiana State University, Cornell University, McGill University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and has taught a graduate-level lighting course for architecture students at Princeton University.

In her lecture, she will discuss Tillotson Design Associates' design process using four award-winning projects as case studies. The East River Waterfront Park (with SHoP Architects and Workshop: Ken Smith Landscape Architect); Cornell University Milstein Hall (with OMA); the Wyly Theater (with OMA and REX); and the Red Bull Music Academy (with Inaba Architects) are the projects to be discussed. For each project, she will present the project criteria and challenges, the inspiration for the solutions and the process for their implementation. The goal is that, by learning about the inspiration and problem-solving techniques used in these case studies, design students will be inspired to think differently about how they approach the creative process of their own work.

The public is invited to attend this lecture.

Admission is free, with limited seating. For more information, contact 479-575-4704 or architecture.uark.edu.