A pair of Parsons School of Design at The New School students have won the Illuminating Engineering Society New York City Section’s (IESNYC) Student Lighting Competition (SLC)
Leela Shanker and Samuel Powers won the Grand Prize for their design “12:04:24 – 12:04:50 AM.”
Both students are enrolled in a dual-degree program combining the Master of Fine Arts in Lighting Design and a Master of Architecture in the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons The New School of Design. The team receives a cash award of $ 2,000.
Pratt Institute’s Zhijian Xiong’s “Tail Away” and Diana Tsoy’s “Space, In Time” won Second and Third
Prize respectively and will receive cash awards of $1,000 and $500.
They, as well as the six students recognized as Honorable Mentions, are attending Pratt Institute and are pursuing a Bachelors of Industrial Design.
Now in its 16th year, the competition challenges students to apply their education, skills, and imagination in order to take an elusive concept and transform it into a three-dimensional illuminated visual experience.
This year’s theme, “Temporal Illuminance,” asked students to interpret how light is interwoven with time and memory.
“We may forget how dependent we are on lighting to mark the passage of time, but it is a relationship that can often be designed and controlled,” said Erin Gussert, LEED AP BD+C, Student Lighting CompetitionCommittee chair, member of the IESNYC Board of Managers, and lighting designer at Regency Lighting.
“The jury and the committee were amazed by all the unique ways the students translated the concept of time and its effect on light in all its variations — whether slow and subtle, quick and intermittent, or entirely random.”
This year’s jury was composed of Rick Hurst, director of sales, Enterprise Lighting Sales, JR Krauza, vice president of product management at Amerlux, Jackson Ning, principal, Kugler Ning Lighting Designer, Kai Sheng, AIA, LEED AP, CEO and managing principal, Archilier Architecture, and Don Holder, principal lighting designer of Don Holder Lighting Design, who was the event’s keynote speaker.
“When considering the use of light to manipulate our sense of time, Don Holder in his 25 years as a lighting designer for theater and television is unquestionably a master and a given in theatrical performance,” said Shaun Fillion, LC, senior designer at RAB Lighting, member of the IESNYC Board of Managers and advisor to the SLC Committee.
“He transports his audience to different worlds, where time accelerates, skips and jumps, and slows to a crawl to support the narrative of the performance.”
The two-time Tony Award winner for The Lion King and South Pacific, gave an inspiring keynote encouraging students to recognize that “light has the power to control how we see and provides the lens on what we see and how we see it.”
For the third consecutive year, the SLC is dedicated to the memory of Patricia DiMaggio (1964-2014), the IESNYC’s 85th president, who founded the competition.
A mere eight students entered the competition in the first year, and this year, over 200 students from area colleges and universities participated and 170 students attending New York School of Design (NYSID), Parsons The New School of Design, and Pratt Institute exhibited their installations.
“The IESNYC champions education at all levels from college students to professionals,” said IESNYC president, lighting designer, and a principal at Shimstone Design Studio.
“The competition presents an opportunity for students to experiment with lighting and the entire evening is a congenial event where students can mingle with each other and the lighting community can see the work of the next generation of lighting designers.”
