Spelman Theatre Presents Kathy Perkins: A Life in the Theater
Lighting designer Kathy A. Perkins will visit Spelman College Rockefeller Arts Building, Baldwin Burroughs Theatre on Thursday, Apr. 17, at 4 p.m. to discuss her career and experience in theater. The program is free and open to the public.
Over the course of a remarkable 45-year career, Perkins has worked in theaters all over the United States and as far away as South Africa and Cuba. Perkins has designed lighting for Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regional theatres such as American Conservatory Theatre, Arena Stage, Berkeley Repertory, Seattle Repertory, St. Louis Black Repertory, Alliance, Goodman, Steppenwolf, Baltimore Center Stage, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, New Federal Theatre, Mark Taper, Yale Repertory, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Syracuse Stage, Two Rivers Theatre, People’s Light, and Playmakers Repertory. Internationally, she has designed in South Africa, Switzerland, Cuba, Canada and Brazil.
As a scholar, she is the editor of seven anthologies focusing on women nationally and internationally. She is a senior editor of the Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance.
Perkins has traveled to nearly fifty countries as both a designer and lecturer. She has received numerous research and design awards, including the Ford Foundation, Fulbright, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Henry Hewes Design Award and an NAACP Image Award. She received the 2019 ATHE Career Achievement in Academic Theatre, the 2021 United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT) Distinguished Achievement Award for both Education and Lighting Design.
In 1995, Perkins co-curated ONSTAGE: A Century of African American Stage Design at New York’s Lincoln Center. In 2016, she served as a theatre consultant for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture's inaugural exhibition, Taking the Stage.
In 2007, she was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. She received her BFA from Howard University and her M.F.A. from the University of Michigan. In 2021, she was awarded a Doctor of Fine Arts (DFA) from the University of Michigan. Perkins is a faculty Emerita at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.