Abi Farnsworth is a New York City based lighting designer for musicals, opera, dance, plays, and stories incorporating music.
Abi has created and collaborated on theatrical lighting designs from NYC and Orlando to the Detroit and Milwaukee Metro areas.
Abi has designed narrative lighting and led production teams in wide-ranging venues from black box and regional theaters to outdoor stadium and commercial theme park.
Employers and clients have included The Orlando Ballet, Cedar Point, ShowFab, Interlochen Center for the Arts, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
About Abi Farnsworth
My passion is narrative lighting design for theatrical works with music including musicals, opera, dance, plays, and live entertainment.
My experience as a sound designer, stage manager, video editor, head electrician, and sound engineer inform my lighting designs in timing, transition, and story telling techniques.
My designs have been seen at Tipping Point Theatre, Timber Lake Playhouse, Interlochen’s Phoenix Theatre, Detroit’s Andy Arts Center, Arthur Miller Theatre, Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre, the Power Center for the Performing Arts, the Jack Crystal Theatre, and the CM Performing Arts Center.
Directors I designed lighting with include award-winning experiences with Gregory Keller, Ryan Dobrin, and Richard R. Henry; as well as award-nominated production and design runs with Tommy Ranieri.
I also designed lighting with directors Devanand Janki, Cameron King, and Jasmine Rivera to favorable design and production reviews.
Dance lighting I designed with J’Sun Howard and Shannon Gillen appeared on the cover and inside the Michigan Muse respectively. Charli Brissey, Kyunghwa Han, and Imani Ma’at Taylor join them as choreographers I designed lighting with in helping to create their artistic productions.
My Assistant Lighting Design contribution on the Orlando Ballet lighting design team under Joseph Walls for the 50th Anniversary $3.6 million redesign of The Nutcracker was mentioned in Light & Sound International (LSi) online, Live Design online, and in the award-winning documentary “Artistry and Innovation: Reimagining the Nutcracker.”
I am excited to continue as Assistant Lighting Designer to Orlando Ballet’s remounting of their 50th Anniversary redesign of the Nutcracker while attending graduate school at NYU/Tisch in Lighting Design for Stage and Film.
