Karyn D. Lawrence

Karyn is an award-winning lighting designer based in Los Angeles. She earned her Master of Fine Arts Degree in Lighting Design from the University of California, Irvine. Karyn was recently awarded a Stage Raw Theater Award for Best Lighting Design for Antaeus Theatre Company’s 2025 production of The Glass Menagerie. She has earned four Los Angeles Ovation Nominations for her work, one for Antaeus Theatre Company’s 2019 production of Eight Nights, Rogue Artists Ensemble’s 2017 production of Kaidan: Walls Grow Thin, one for Boston Court Pasadena’s 2016 production of Colony Collapse and one for Ebony Repertory Theater's 2015 production of The Gospel at Colonus. Her work on International City Theatre's production of Fences earned her a 2016 NAACP Theater Award for Best Lighting. She has also designed for other regional/local theater companies including Center Theatre Group, South Coast Repertory, La Mirada Theater, East West Players, The Pasadena Playhouse, A Noise Within, The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Arizona Broadway Theatre, and Great River Shakespeare Festival. She is the resident lighting designer for Fugitive Kind Theater Ensemble as well as for The New Swan Shakespeare Festival. In addition to theater, she is Radiance Lightworks' lead lighting designer for Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights. She teaches lighting design at California State University Los Angeles and has taught numerous lighting classes and/or mentored lighting students at Loyola Marymount University, Occidental College, University of California, Irvine, University of Southern California, and California State University Long Beach. Her work has been seen in Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Romania. When she is not designing, she is most likely spending time with her husband and young son, or riding her horses in the mountains near her home. 

Current/Upcoming Projects: 

• Karyn is the lead lighting designer for the houses once again for the 2026 season of Halloween Horror Nights with Radiance Lightworks at Universal Studios Hollywood.

• Karyn is currently designing the lighting for CSULA’s production of Fiddler on the Roof to be produced in the State Playhouse in April 2026.

• Karyn is currently designing the lighting for The Merry Wives of Windsor Cove, directed by Eli Simon for the New Swan Shakespeare Festival in Orange County.