About Joshua Benghiat

Joshua Benghiat’s lighting design work includes theater, opera, concert halls, dance, broadcast, and live events.  Theatrical design and associate work spans Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regional including Center Theatre Group, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Goodman Theatre, Alliance Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Syracuse Stage, McCarter Theatre, Barter Theatre, and Geva Theatre Center.  

A frequent designer for classical music concerts, Josh designed several seasons of the Lincoln Center White Light Festival and concerts at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, and he is currently the lighting designer for The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. In addition to the live audiences at Alice Tully Hall and the Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio, Josh’s work can be seen on CMS’s live stream platforms and documentary projects, including CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY RETURNS, which airs on PBS. As part of Lincoln Center’s Restart Stages, he lit the Jaffe Drive venue, including Continuum, curated by Nick Kendall. 

As a freelance designer for Ferri Lighting Design & Associates, Josh has worked on several broadcast projects for CNBC, ESPN, Cheddar News, Scripps, and NBC Universal.

Josh also serves as Associate Artistic Director of the Jewish Plays Project, playing an active role in new play development. He is a long-time associate to Allen Lee Hughes, with recent collaborations including TONI STONE, A SOLDIER’S PLAY, THE TAP DANCE KID, TOPDOG/UNDERDOG, OHIO STATE MURDERS, and HAMLET in the Park.

An early adopter of CAD technology for lighting design, Josh has over twenty five years of experience drafting with Vectorworks as well as 3D modeling and rendering. He is also an independent developer of lighting design-focused plug-ins for Vectorworks, with some of his solutions integrated with the shipping version of Vectorworks 2014. His Savvy Series, BeamViz, and ProjectionViz plug-ins have become a vital component to lighting and projection designers around the globe working in theater, opera, dance, events, and television.

Josh is a Lecturer in Design at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. He has previously served on the faculties of Brooklyn College and the Fashion Institute of Technology, and has been a guest at the theater departments of UMass Amherst, Rutgers University, DePaul University, and NYU’s Department of Design for Stage and FIlm. 

He received an AB from the University of Chicago and an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He resides in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

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