A PhD by Anthony Arblaster at the University of York.
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.
I started this PhD in 2025, while continuing teaching at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in London. I teach lighting design, production electrics and programming on the Academy’s practice-based courses. After completing a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws at the Australian National University, I moved to London. In 2012 I completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Stage Electrics and Lighting Design at RADA.
I live and work in London as an educator and Lighting Designer. You can find out more about me and my Lighting Design work, at anthonyarblaster.com.
Or you can follow me on social media:
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.
The PhD focuses on developing a dramaturgical tool kit for lighting designers to use while creating work. It isn’t focused on the final product – rather it aims to be a tool for practice. The PhD will be undertaken through practice-based research which will ensure my research retains value for practitioners.
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 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 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.
This project is archived using Zenodo the open repository from CERN. To reference this site you can use DOI 10.5281/zenodo.15276039.