About
My Story
Josh Karp is a lighting designer based in the New York metro area. His path started in high school, working stage crew for a local community theatre — the kind of hands-on education that teaches you how a show actually gets built before you ever learn the theory.
That interest sharpened into a calling in 2007, watching Kevin Adams' original Broadway lighting design for Spring Awakening at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, where saturated color, pushed to rock-concert intensity, did the work of separating the outer world of the story from the churning internal song-world of teenagers confronting emotions too big to hold. The following season, David Hersey's lighting for the Equus revival at the Broadhurst showed Josh the opposite lesson — that what you choose not to reveal can be just as powerful, using shadow and selective visibility as deliberately as light itself.
Between the two, Josh saw how lighting acts to support the story, both as its own character and as a more subtle influence, and he's designed with both lessons in mind ever since.
He went on to earn a B.A. in Theatre with a focus in Lighting Design and Technology from SUNY Geneseo, and today works as a Broadway & Theatre Lighting Account Executive at PRG — a role that keeps him fluent in the newest gear and techniques in the industry, alongside his own design work.
My Aesthetic
Through his work at PRG, Josh has gotten to know many of the designers whose work continues to shape his own — taking lessons like using a restrained color palette that connects to the emotional core of a show, approaching a design deliberately and thoughtfully before ever stepping into the theatre, and embracing how lush, richly textured light can elevate a design, from designers like Bradley King, Adam Honoré, and Don Holder, and incorporating them into his own work.
Today, Josh's designs live in the space between bold, saturated color and deep, deliberate shadow — often both in the same show. Reviewers have picked up on it directly: writing about his 2024 production of Spring Awakening at Schenectady Light Opera, the Daily Gazette noted the fittingly bleak, shadow-driven quality of his design, while Nippertown pointed to his icy blue palette and stark use of spotlight against darkness.
Recent credits include Matilda and White Christmas at the Waterville Opera House — his design for Matilda earned Best Lighting Design (Non-Professional) from BroadwayWorld Maine — and Spring Awakening at Schenectady Light Opera, a full-circle project bringing his own voice to the show that started it all.