Camtastic Newsletter December 2025

Professor Jaemin Park Makes Lighting Magic Happen at the SoTD and Beyond 

by HD Motyl

When School of Theater and Dance assistant professor Jaemin Park was studying music performance and conducting in his native Korea, he did not expect these talents to affect his next choice of a career, especially a career that does not use sound:  Lighting Design.  But he now knows that his music background, especially conducting, has trained him well for this creative work in lighting.

“When I think about lighting design, I think that I am conducting.”  He punctuates the air with hands, as if standing in front of an orchestra wielding a baton, and shouts “Blue! Red! Green!”.  Now, his hands come together, palms up, and then rise quickly up in front of him: “Intensity!” he cries, as if ordering the lights themselves to grow brighter.  Then, his hands fall slowly, and he whispers, “Fade out...” and you can almost see the lights come down.    

A lot of Park’s work over the past four years (he first began at SIU in his tenure track position in 2023, after a year as an NTT Assistant Professor of Practice) has been on the School of Theater and Dance productions, both musicals and plays, as well as an opera or two for the School of Music. His work off campus just in the past year has taken him to Cleveland, Cape Girardeau, and to New York City, at the off-Broadway theater Classic Stage Company.  He will be busy throughout 2026, too, designing shows in Ohio and Florida.  (He’s especially excited about the production in Florida; it is Kim’s Convenience, an off-Broadway hit about a Korean grocer and his family in Toronto.) 

When approaching a design for a production, Professor Park’s process is along the usual routes:  he comes up with concepts for his designs in meetings with the director and other designers of the show, those working on the set, costumes, sound, etc.  Together, there is a consensus on the overall vision and themes of the shows, before the designers allow their ideas to germinate and grow. 

To facilitate his visualization process and discover the details of his designs for a show, he visits rehearsals, watching how the show’s director works with the actors to build character, as well as observing the blocking and movement across and on the stage.  When the show is on the Carbondale campus, this is easy to do of course—he just walks into the Moe or McLeod Theater and watches.  However, throughout the school year, Park designs shows in other states, so he depends on recordings of the rehearsals that he requests from the shows’ stage managers.  Eventually, of course, he must be present at the theaters, to hang the instruments, tweak them, and literally see his ideas come to life.

One challenge Park sometimes encounters is language.  He is not a native English speaker and is working primarily with English-language scripts and librettos. In fall of 2025, he completed a design for a Spanish-language play, La Versión Infinita at the LatinUs Theater in Cleveland, and he doesn’t speak Spanish.  To aid himself in both languages, he uses translation apps to help him understand the play, but “the dictionaries and translators can’t give me the culture . . . therefore, I need to research the culture and history” of the world of the play.  Interestingly, he finds musicals to be a bit more difficult to work on, especially the songs.  “The music I can feel because of my background in music, but reading the first time, the lyrics can be difficult . . . because they are not always complete sentences, are more like poetry, and I need more study” of them. Watching rehearsals helps him here, too.

Professor Park has begun taking his designs to international stages.  In the summer of 2025, he taught for a month at the French Institute Cambodia in Phnom Penh, while designing the lighting for their production of Disney’s Aladdin. In November 2025, he attended the Lagos International Theater Festival in Lagos, Nigeria, where he lectured about his craft, and designed the lights for a production of Home by Samm-Art Williams, directed by his Theater & Dance colleague, Professor Segun Ojewuyi. 

Closer to home, he is in discussion with companies in St Louis about collaborations and hopes to meet with some theater producers in Chicago soon, to get some work there.  His dream, of course, is to work on Broadway, but he has a priority: achieving tenure and promotion.

Professor Park compares Lighting Design to figure skating, especially to the scoring after a skating performance:  marks are given for skill, the technical qualities, and for art, the creative qualities.  “A good lighting designer, “he believes, “has to work both sides, technically and artistically.”  Knowing the technical allows the inspiration for him to express the art and emotion of the story.  “A high-level technician is an artist; an artist is a technician.”  

In March of 2026, you can see his skill and art come together on the Shryock Auditorium stage for the School of Theater & Dance and School of Music production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes.