192: America The Beautiful (Except the Financial Setup for Freelancers) with Lighting Designer Jane Cox

Lighting designer Jane Cox discusses life as a freelance theatre designer who has also taken on some full time academic work.

Topics:

⭐️ Parenting while working in the arts

⭐️ Paying student loans with a credit card

⭐️ Prioritizing the needs of the community above the market rate

⭐️ The financial system working against theatre design as a career

⭐️ Jane’s tax rate as a freelancer nearing 50%, and having it lower once she started working a full time W2 job.

Video Version

https://youtu.be/jA1IOCWmHFs

Artistic Finance

https://linktr.ee/artisticfinance

Jane Cox

https://janecoxlight.squarespace.com/

https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-cast-staff/jane-cox-115195

Appropriate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriate_(play)

Linda Essig

https://www.artisticfinance.com/147.html

Penny Remsen

https://www.umass.edu/theater/about/directory/penny-remsen

https://www.linkedin.com/in/penny-remsen-1b53b8a/

Irish Session

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_traditional_music_session

Cory Pattak's Podcast

https://in1podcast.com/

Light Talk Podcast

https://lighttalk.libsyn.com/

NYU Graduate Design School

https://tisch.nyu.edu/design

University of Massachussets Amherts

https://www.umass.edu/theater/

Clifton Taylor

https://cliftontaylor.com/

Jennifer Tipton

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Tipton

False Steps - Off-Broadway Play

https://www.falsestepscomedy.com/

Jane Cox is a theater maker, an educator and a lighting designer working in theater, opera, dance and music. Jane won a Tony, a Drama Desk and the Henry Hewes award in 2024 for her lighting for Appropriate, and has three Tony nominations for Macbeth (‘22), Jitney (‘17) and Machinal (‘14). Her creative career has been built on relationships; some of the extraordinary theatrical artists who have shaped her creative life include Ruben Santiago-Hudson, John Doyle, Elise Thoron, Shariffa Ali, Caitríona MacLaughlin, Sam Pinkleton, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Stacey Derosier and Sam Gold. Jane is also inspired by her brilliant students and young alumni

Recent designs include a co-design for Michael R Jackson and Anna K Jacob’s Teeth with Stacey Derosier; Donnacha Dennehy’s Land of Winter at the Irish Arts Center; The Weir at the Abbey Theater in Dublin (her home town); Felon: An American Washi Tale; and The Marriage of Figaro, Cosi and Don Giovanni at San Francisco Opera. Upcoming projects include Marina Carr’s new trilogy at the Abbey in Dublin and the Rocky Horror Show on Broadway.

Other highlights have been co-organizing and hosting the 2023 symposium and creative convening The Future of Race in Design at the Park Avenue Armory with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Mimi Lien and Mikaal Sulaiman; organizing a series of events with returning citizens in conjunction with performances of Felon: An American Washi Tale by Reginald Dwayne Betts; working with the engineer Naomi Leonard, composer Dan Trueman and co-designer Tess James on Rhythm Bots, a project investigating collective motion and rhythmic connection with robots; and receiving a Distinguished Achievement Award from USITT in 2025.

Jane has been a member of the Monica Bill Barnes dance company for more than twenty years and has been working with fellow lighting designer Tess James in many capacities for fifteen. She is a Professor of the Practice and Director of the Program in Theater and Music Theater at Princeton University, where she is also the co-director for the Fund for Irish Studies and a member of CreativeX. She is married to brilliant conceptual artist Evan Alexander and they have a fantastic teenage daughter who so far shows no interest in going into theatre.

Instagram Handles

@janecoxlight

@ethansteimel

@nicolevsteimel