Tony-winning lighting designer Donald Holder to visit Rice

Rice University
Office of Public Affairs / News & Media Relations

MEDIA ADVISORY

Katharine Shilcutt
713-348-6760
kshilcutt@rice.edu

Tony-winning lighting designer Donald Holder to visit Rice

HOUSTON – (Oct. 31, 2018) – Donald Holder, the renowned theatrical lighting designer behind “The Lion King” and scores of other Broadway productions, will deliver a lecture at Rice University and demonstrate some of the methods he has mastered during his decadeslong career in American theater.

The Rice University Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts (VADA) will host Holder as part of its Arts in Humanities Lecture Series Nov. 13 at 12:15 p.m. at Hamman Hall. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will include lunch and will be followed by hands-on demonstrations of the techniques Holder will discuss.

Holder, the head of lighting design at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts, has worked extensively in the U.S. and abroad as a lighting designer for television, theater, opera, dance and Broadway performances. He has been nominated for 13 Tony Awards, winning in 1998 for “The Lion King” and in 2008 for the revival of “South Pacific.” His recent and upcoming Broadway productions include “Tootsie,” “Bullets Over Broadway,” Spiderman Turn Off the Dark,” “Fiddler On The Roof,” “The Bridges Of Madison County,” “On The Twentieth Century,” “Ragtime” and “Movin’ Out.”

Holder’s lecture will convey the psychological and physiological aspects of light and how a lighting designer manipulates the medium to evoke a particular response. Following the lecture, audience members will be encouraged to participate in Holder’s lighting demonstrations.

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For more information, contact Katharine Shilcutt, media relations specialist at Rice, at 713-348-6760 or kshilcutt@rice.edu.

This news release can be found online at http://news.rice.edu/.

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Related information:

For more information on the Arts in Humanities Lecture Series, visit https://vada.rice.edu/news-and-events/arts-in-the-humanities-lecture-series.

For more information on Donald Holder, visit http://www.masongross.rutgers.edu/theater/faculty/donald-holder.

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,970 undergraduates and 2,934 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 2 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go to http://tinyurl.com/RiceUniversityoverview.