TDM Instructor Spotlight: Jeff Adelberg

This week's TDM Instructor Spotlight features lighting designer and set designer Jeff Adelberg! This semester, Jeff is teaching TDM 154: Designing with Light.

What have you enjoyed about teaching in TDM?

Outstanding support and trust from the department.

Lively and curious students.

The rich, expansive resources of Harvard – figuring out ways to integrate a few of these into the classroom is something I'm very excited about this year.

The head & shoulders of Jeff Adelberg, a bearded white man in a red shirt, smiling at the camera.
Tell us a little bit about your class!

“Designing with Light”, now in its second year, is a course devoted to understanding light as a medium. I consider it to be a studio art class – much as you would learn how to work with paint in an introductory painting class, in this class you learn to understand and manipulate light as an expressive medium. Although we employ a theatrical vocabulary and theatrical equipment, you can also apply these discoveries to film, photography, architecture, interior design, or numerous other fields – or you can simply deepen your observational skills and enjoy how that enriches everyday life.

A stage lit dramatically with yellow light. A performer stands with their hands on a cart carrying multiple boxes and a dollhouse
What do you do as an artist?

My practice is primarily as a theatrical Lighting Designer, and in that capacity I work with many different clients. Lighting Design is a contributory craft and only exists collaboratively, so all of my work depends on source material (scripts, music, etc) and other artists (directors, other designers). I get to work with a wide variety of material in all kinds of spaces with constantly changing groups of people. But the goal is always the same: figure out what kind of light the work wants, and make that.

Performers dressed in white sit in various places around a stage lit with bright white bulbs. A performer sits centrally on a small piano at a precarious angle
What’s something you’re excited about happening in the arts right now?

There's a long-overdue reckoning going on, having to do with respect and accessibility. Workers at all levels (myself included) are standing up for their right to be treated with dignity, be fairly compensated, and make their voices heard. Then there's an awakening around WHO has the privilege to make work, and how gatekeeping in various forms has constrained the art since forever. We're only beginning to discover what the possibilities are when certain barriers are broken. It's very exciting, and it's only just beginning.

Learn more about Jeff’s work here: jeffadelberg.com

Photo 2: People Places and Things, Speakeasy Stage Co, 2022

Photo 3: The Stone, Arlekin Players Theatre, May, 2019

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