Light Dramaturgy
Hi, my name is Anthony. I’m a lighting designer for live performance based in London. I am originally from Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country, Australia. This site is the home of my PhD at the University of York. The PhD is focused on developing a dramaturgical toolkit for lighting designers. Tools that can be used within their own designs and inside the broader production.
The research will involve interviews with other practicing Lighting Designers, to capture the detail of their processes. Finding out what has worked, but also, crucially, what hasn’t. The research will also pull in research from the existing research into dramaturgy by directors, actors and designers. Research that will inform my practice and the work I do inside production processes.
The research is being conducted at the University of York, but is also supported by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). RADA is providing access to production processes, and support for my research.
About Anthony
I started this PhD in 2025, while teaching at RADA in London. As Deputy Head of Lighting, and Course Leader for the MA Performance Lighting Design, I am jointly responsible for all teaching and learning about lighting in the Academy. Both within Technical Theatre Arts (TTA) programmes, and across the Academy’s courses. Covering the full range of lighting design and technology, my teaching and research are intertwined.
You can find out more about me and my Lighting Design work, at anthonyarblaster.com.
About the PhD
The preliminary title is: Towards a Light Dramaturgy: Techniques and Practice of Dramaturgy as Lighting Design
This PhD is by creative practice at the School of Arts and Creative Technologies at the University of York. It is supervised by Dr Katherine Graham and Dr Rebecca Benzie, both at the School of ACT.
You can find out more about the PhD in Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media (by creative practice) on the University of York website.
This project is being conducted according to restrictions that have been subject to approval by the School of Arts and Creative Technologies Ethics committee. The Chair of the ACT Ethics committee can be contacted on ACT-ethics@york.ac.uk.
About This Site
This webpage will be the repository for shared documents, tools and information arrising out of the PHD. The exact shape of this site will come into focus as I move through the early stages of the PhD. I hope it will be a home for recordings, writing, interview transcripts and more. The research was inspired by a desire to recognise and share the knowledge held by lighting designers about dramaturgy. To help practitioners at all career stages find ideas, techniques and approaches to dramaturgy in their own practice. This website exists to share that knowledge with a non-academic audience, encouraging the valuable connection between research and practice.
Problems and Improvements
The site is built using GitHub Pages, and is hosted @aarblaster/light-dramaturgy, where you can report an issue and view the source code for this site. The site is powered by Jekyll and Academic Pages, a fork of Minimal Mistakes.
Referencing
This project is archived using Zenodo the open repository from CERN. To reference this site you can use DOI 
Tools for Research
I use a number of tools for managing and conducting my research. I use Zotero a free, open source citation manager. I also use Obsidian for note taking and writing.
