Delaney Price is a DC and Pittsburgh based lighting designer, stage manager, writer, and creative. She is a graduate of Duke Ellington School of the Arts Technical Design and Production program and is a current student in the School of Drama Design program at Carnegie Mellon University. As a former dancer, she views her lighting as a choreography of sorts, establishing its own visual language. She has a love for dance, theatre, and concert lighting with a specific interest in new works.
Artist Statement:
My goal as a designer is to provoke thought in sophisticated and nuanced ways. My drive is to hone my craft well enough to where my subtle shifts in lighting can deeply affect the audience experience. The tension, relief, and underlying cyclical messages that can be created through light are exciting to me.
Thematically, I am drawn to pieces that explore culture, the role of women, and reflect on society. I believe that theater should be used to make a point. One word that fuels my art practice is galvanize: to shock or excite into taking action. How as artists can we galvanize our audience into action is a question I wish was posed more in the rehearsal room. Galvanization ties in with work that challenges the audience. For example, plays that intrigue me include Heroes of the Fourth Turning, The Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner, and Which Way to the Stage. They are meant to present jarring themes, captivate and immerse the audience, and leave one saying “What did I just watch?” and “Who can I discuss with?”
I value working in theater with a decolonization lens. What theatrical works have we left out because we are uncomfortable about Western relationships with them? I believe we can find this intricate balance between mission and entertainment. While art has the power to be hard and reflective, how we can return back to joy and what the relationship between art, joy, and entertainment looks like is something I want to figure out. We can both laugh or dance or sing for two hours and care deeply about changing the systems that exist.