More than a century ago, electric lights replaced dangerous gas lamps and revolutionized theatrical lighting. Then, in the 1970s, computerized lighting control advanced the craft by enabling repeating lighting cues. “On Broadway, A Chorus Line was the first production to use a computerized control board,” says William Kenyon, who directs the Penn State School of Theatre’s Lighting Design program. “You’d program the cue, and then every time you went back to it, it was always the same set of levels.”

Now, Kenyon says, color-changing LED lights are the next revolution in theater lighting. During the COVID-19 pandemic, University Park overhauled its Pavilion Theatre and installed a full LED lighting system that’s capable of millions of color combinations—“way more than the human eye can see,” says Kenyon. “That allows us to have a lot more color agility, but it also means that the students have to be even more prepared in advance for what color they’re going to put in a particular light for every scene. There’s more capability but also more work on the front end.”

Whenever he can, Kenyon—who is an active professional designer and has worked on over 200 productions across the country—endeavors to take his students along to assist him on professional engagements, so that they are exposed to the latest advances in lighting technology and real-time experience working with it. 

“We have a joke amongst lighting designers,” he says, “that without lighting it’s all radio. Lighting creates the mood—it tells you where you are, where to look, where the action is.”

Kenyon got his first exposure to the field of lighting design when his high school in Delaware built a brand-new theater and some teachers who knew the ninth grader to be tech-savvy tapped him to work the lights. “At the time, I thought, ‘Great, I can hide in the booth in the dark,’” he says. “I was never interested in being onstage.”

It was trial by fire—with some assistance from a lighting design student at the University of Delaware, brought in for a couple of weeks by the high school to share his expertise with Kenyon. By the time he graduated, Kenyon had done the lighting for all his high school’s productions, and he had a career plan. He obtained a BFA in lighting design from the University of Connecticut, earned an MFA from Brandeis University, and moved to New York in 1995. He worked on Broadway and off-Broadway shows, and toured internationally with several dance companies for five years, and then embarked on a teaching career, spending five years at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln before joining Penn State—where he is in charge of lighting all School of Theatre productions—in 2004.