Jane Cox

Jane Cox is an Irish lighting designer. She has been nominated for five Tony Awards, and won the 2024 Tony Award for Best Lighting Design of a Play for her work on Appropriate. She teaches at Princeton University.

Early life and education Jane Cox is from Dublin, Ireland. Her parents had moved there from the north of England; her mother worked for Amnesty International Ireland and her father was a professor at Trinity College.

Cox studied flute at the University of London before changing her major to theatre. She worked as a light board operator on an undergraduate production of a Caryl Churchill play, an experience she found to be "like music, only in a visual medium." She studied abroad at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she was mentored by American lighting designer Penny Remson.

After relocating to the United States, Cox worked odd jobs, including as a theater electrician at Hartford Stage, before pursuing graduate studies at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. She graduated in 1998 with an MFA in lighting design. She credits another member of the NYU faculty, Susan Hilferty, with helping her get her first professional design job after graduate school. In 2001, Cox was accepted into the National Endowment for the Arts/Theater Communications Group Career Development Program for promising early-career artists.

Lighting design Over the course of a decades-long career, Cox has designed theatre, opera, and dance productions in the United States and internationally. She has an extensive list of Broadway credits, including Macbeth (2022), which starred Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga, and the musical adaptation of Amélie. Internationally, her work has been seen at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and the National Theatre in London.

In 2022's Broadway production of Macbeth, Cox and director Sam Gold drew creative inspiration from a comparison between theater craft and witchcraft. They chose a heavily saturated color palette influenced by horror films, feminist artists like Judy Chicago, and the band Pussy Riot's punk-activist spectacles. In the production, the actors operated custom-built portable fog machines and handheld lighting instruments to shape the atmosphere onstage. They worked backward from there to draw out a stage picture for the rest of the play, one characterized by obscurity and claustrophobia. Cox dedicated her Tony win to "all the patient partners and children of theater-makers everywhere."

Critical reception The New York Times has described Cox's work as "painterly" and "eye-teasing". Critic Jesse Green called her work for Annie Baker's The Flick at Playwrights Horizons "almost orgasmically expressive." In Variety, her lighting for a National Theatre production of Hamlet starring Benedict Cumberbatch was compared to "sumptuous cinematography."

Stage credits

Awards and nominations

Other work Since 2016, Jane Cox has been the director of the Program in Theater and Music Theater at Princeton University. She has been on the Princeton faculty since 2007. Cox has also taught at NYU Tisch, UMass Amherst, Vassar College, and Sarah Lawrence College.

Cox has worked as a producer and arts administrator. in 2020, she was one of the founding members of Design Action, a coalition of theater designers organized against racial inequity in theater design and advocating for change in the theater industry. As part of her work with Design Action, Cox was one of the co-organizers of the Park Avenue Armory's 2023 symposium event "Sound & Color: The Future of Race in Design" alongside fellow theater artists Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Mimi Lien, and Mikaal Sulaiman, and curator Tavia Nyong'o. The event was partly inspired by a class that Cox had co-taught at Princeton with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, focused on race and lighting design.

Personal life Cox lives in Princeton, New Jersey. She is married to designer Evan Alexander, with whom she has a daughter, Becket.