Jackson Key Theatrical

Antlers

2nd Year MFA Directing Materials Project, Columbia University School of the Arts, Schapiro Theatre Fall 2023

Role: Scenic & Lighting Designer Director / Writer / Puppetry: Ghina Fawaz

Antlers, follows a girl named Rania set on a journey through the fantastical Cedar Island is a new work based on the interviews of Lebanese citizens about the end of the fifteen year occupation of south Lebanon in 2000 - aside from Rania - all other characters who appear are puppets. Produced for a 2nd year MFA directing project, the project was realized on a very tight timeline with a limited budget largely of found material. Chains grown over with ivy, rope, fabric, and flowers created a perimeter and trees surrounding the performers and reaching up to the grid creating a relationship between inside and outside, center and edge. Lighting establishes the various villages and paths along the journey as well as weaving in and out of the worlds of the monologues and magical reveals.

Photo Credits: Jonathan Barbee, Jackson Key

Process Collage Render

The Queen of the Living Room

New Plays Festival (MFA Playwriting Thesis), Columbia University School of the Arts, Lenfest Center for the Arts Spring 2024

Role: Scenic & Lighting Designer

Director: Chaesong Kim

Three women gather for a birthday party for a one year old child. The evening unfolds over several hours into the morning where no party materializes building to the offstage murder of a returning husband. The piece veers from the banal to the absurd and the design, established by a landscape of minimal objects supported by lighting that grew stark and harsh, the shadows cutting tensions across the scene from the edges from the original isolated center on the rug in an infinitely expanding house beyond.

Photo Credits: Jonathan Barbee

Photo Credits: Jonathan Barbee

The Accidental Death of an Anarchist

Live Arts Theatre - Gibson Theatre Spring 2022

Role: Scenic & Lighting Designer Director: Susan E Evans

Photo Credit: Will Kerner

Photo Credit: Will Kerner

The Madman at the top of the show entering from the outside. Photo Credit: Will Kerner

Preliminary Sketch - the audience “judges” the foregoing as jurors to the Madman’s inquiries.

Preliminary Collage Rendering

working render viewed from the balcony

Wreckage of the bombing that preceeded the events (and perhaps indeed the chaos of the world), underpins and susurrounds the events.

Developmental Isometric Sketch

View from house right of the preshow. The stage is twisted and warped in the regularity of the room. Fragments of window architecture loom above with the wreckage below placing the action in a liminal space.

16 Winters, or the Bear’s Tale

UVa Drama Department Mainstage - Culbreth Theatre

Spring 2022

Role: Scenic Designer

Director: Kathleen Morris

The play, located in the 16 year act break of “A Winter’s Tale” is a play across numerous locations, yet outside of time -it is a play about waiting located between the woods and the theatre and is told by a Bear. The process required many iterations through sketches, collages, models, and drawings.

Photo Credit: James Looney

Second Design Iterative Collage

Photo Credit: James Looney

Bear's Clock

All decks walkable. Unit needs to be able to move/rotate, and able to lock in place.

Consult with TD regarding safety. (Note that the unit is <30" tall)

Unit will have dressing including a couch. TBD with Props Master.

Hard facing as noted in Red.Otherwise vertical surfaces "exposed." Facing dimension not shown. Deck Surfaces covered in 1 4" MDF not shown. Treatments TBD.

Christmas lights practical to be determined with the LD.

Hat-rack may be built or if we have on in storage borrowed.

FOR BID v3,

16 Winters

UVa Department of Drama: Culbreth Theatre.

Scenic Designer: Jackson Key

Director: Kate Norris

Technical Director: Casey Horton 02.24.22

Props Master: Sam Flippo

Bid Drawing: Bohemia Wagon 3

Scale: 1 2" =1'

The Simon Suites

Columbia University Performing Arts League - Glicker | Milstein Theatre at Barnard College Spring 2023

Role: Scenic Designer / Co-Technical Director

Director: Julia Ruth Patella

Photo Credits: Emily Lord, Josh Halvei, Jackson Key

The Simon Suites was a new work framed as a experiment to tell a narrative theatrical story through the medium of dance. Set to the music of Paul Simon the dance followed two couples and the course of their relationships. The scenery formed a backdrop of fragments of the several locations across 1970s New York: a club, the sidewalk, each couple’s apartment, and a doctor’s office while giving the maximum amount of floor space to use for dance. Walls pivoted, and beds rolled from under the stage to allow for seamless transitions. The project was executed on minimal time and budget, being explored started with the sketch into a series of renderings before moving into construction.

Final Composite Render

Henry VI: the Civil Wars

Third Year MFA Actors, Columbia University School of the Arts, Schapiro Theatre

Fall 2023

Role: Scenic Designer / Props Designer

Director: Katy Walsh

Henry VI: the Civil Wars is a cut of Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 following the key political figures intersecting and juxtaposing the political machinations with the brutality of battle leading to the war of the roses. Banners as surfaces for projection and lighting where pulled down throughout the production adding to a pile of detritus and artifact of conflict on the throne as symbol of the cost of power and path from order to chaos. The Throne on its dais implies an axis and evoked the English Coronation throne, the rituals of court. Two long tables and 6 chairs allowed for the swift movement and configuration for locations from the halls of Parliament to the battlefield of France.

On the Evolutionary Function of

2nd Year MFA Collaboration Project, Columbia University School of the Arts, Schapiro Theatre Spring 2024

Role: Lighting Designer

Director: L.D. Kelley

of Shame

Two plays in parallel, one of Adam & Eve finding thier way after being expelled from the Garden of Eden; the other of two twins, one a medical researcher, the other a trans artist navigating pregnancy, family, and thier own relationship.

Photo Credits: Jonathan Barbee

(un) furled - Fall Dance Concert 2021

Lighting Design for the UVa Drama Dance program piece (un)furled for Kim Brooks Mata (Director, UVa Dance) UVa Drama Department - Caplin Theatre

Fall 2021

The Choreographer envisioned a piece wherein “dancers furl and unfurl in relation to themselves, each other and the spaces they are moving through”, and explore the world of isolation, and rejoining of the past 2 years in three movements. The Lighting design worked to build from isolation to collective, and aid the transition of movement to movement through an evolutionary language of color, texture, and dimension.

Photo Credits: Justin Poruban

Notes on Transition - Fall Dance Concert 2019

Lighting Design for the UVa Drama Dance Program piece Notes on Transition for Merdith Sutton UVa Drama Department - Caplin Theatre Fall 2019

The work, as described by the Choreographer: “gives a nod to Susan Sontag’s daring literary work, explores the wrenching unpredictability experienced in times of transition and its undoubted rootedness in community and isolation.” The lighting design en-captured the dancers as they grappled with entering and leaving, and heightening the moments of unity, or division between the dancers.

Photo Credits: Tom Daly

Diversity Awareness Picnic

UVa Drama Department Mainstage - Caplin Theatre

Fall 2021

Role: Lighting Designer

Director; Michael Jerome Johnson

The play, located in a college office, followed an ensemble themselves and each other contrasting moments logues that took the audience into the mind of each “pulling the scenes forward”. The lighting supporting audience follow the focus moment to moment.

ensemble cast as they grappled with of gathering, tension, and monoeach character under a giant clock supporting these moments to help the

VECTORWORKS EDUCATIONAL VERSION

VECTORWORKS EDUCATIONAL VERSION

VECTORWORKS EDUCATIONAL VERSION

VECTORWORKS EDUCATIONAL VERSION

VECTORWORKS EDUCATIONAL VERSION

VECTORWORKS EDUCATIONAL VERSION

VECTORWORKS EDUCATIONAL VERSION

VECTORWORKS EDUCATIONAL VERSION

VECTORWORKS EDUCATIONAL VERSION

VECTORWORKS EDUCATIONAL VERSION

VECTORWORKS EDUCATIONAL VERSION

VECTORWORKS EDUCATIONAL VERSION

VECTORWORKS EDUCATIONAL VERSION

VECTORWORKS EDUCATIONAL VERSION

VECTORWORKS EDUCATIONAL VERSION

VECTORWORKS EDUCATIONAL VERSION

The Humans

Live Arts Theatre, Gibson Theatre

Winter 2020

Role: Lighting Designer

The Humans is set in a duplex Chinatown apartment where a family gathers for Thanksgiving. It is a production of both the subtly of real time, realistic action and gripping emotion and introspection. The lighting, through a stylized language of cool and warm helped the audience feel the tonal shifts and follow the actors both spoken and non spoken in the nonstop action across two floors.

Photo Credit: Martyn Kyle

Photo Credit: Martyn Kyle

Photo Credit: Martyn Kyle

Rent

Live Arts Theatre, Gibson Theatre

June 2019

Role: Lighting Designer

Rent is a complex musical with a large cast set in the 1990s East Village of New York City. The set of this production was a large thrust with moving scaffolding which presented a dynamic playing volume to illuminate. The lighting designs captured character color, shifts between moments reflective of the harsh cold of street winter , introspective despair and anger, and colorful post industrial rock and roll.

Photo Credits: Martyn Kyle