Victor En Yu Tan (Associate professor of lighting design)
email: tanv@umkc.edu
campus phone: (816) 235-2767
 
Victor En Yu Tan (associate professor of lighting design) has designed over 500 productions in his career since making his New York professional lighting design debut for Frank Chin’s Year of the Dragon (world premiere) for the American Place Theatre in 1974. Most recently, he designed the lights for Daniel Beaty’s Resurrection (world premiere) co-produced by Arena Stage and Hartford Stage, Ifa Bayeza’s The Ballad of Emmett Till (world premiere) for the Goodman Theatre, Rebecca Schull’s On Naked Soil (world premiere) for the Theatre for the New City, Lydia Diamond’s Stick Fly (east coast premiere) for the McCarter Theatre, and Gee’s Bend for the Cleveland Playhouse. This fall he will design the lights for the Broadway revival of For Colored Girls at the Circle in the Square Theater. In NYC, he has designed over 40 shows for the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre including the critically acclaimed Shogun Macbeth (2008), the critically acclaimed Cambodia Agonistes (2005), Joy Luck Club, Tea, Legacy Codes (NYC premiere), Forbidden City Blues (world premiere), Rashomon, and over 25 shows for the New York Shakespeare Festival including George Wolfe’s The Colored Museum (NYC premiere), the world premieres of Ntosake Shange’s For Colored Girls . . ., Spell # 7, and A Photograph, and the world premieres of David Henry Hwang’s FOB and Dance and the Railroad. His Broadway and off-Broadway credits include the New York Shakespeare Festival productions of As You Like It, Macbeth, and Romeo And Juliet at the Belasco Theater, Joy Luck Club at TheatreFour, Sheila’s Day at the New Victory Theatre and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Yiddish musicals, The Golden Land and On Second Avenue, Noa Ain's opera Trio at Carnegie Hall, and many others. He had designed over 20 productions for the Kansas City Repertory Theatre including Borderland, Under Midwestern Stars (world premiere), The Young Lady From Rwanda (American premiere), and over 20 productions for the Sacramento Theatre Company including  Someone’s Somebody (world premiere), A Peculiar and Sudden Nearness of the Moon (world premiere), Gem of the Ocean, Cinderella, and Topdog/Underdog. For the outdoor summer theatre of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, he designed Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, To Kill A Mockingbird, Macbeth, Love’s Labours Lost, Three Musketeers, Julius Caesar, Servant of Two Masters, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Other regional theatres include Crossroads Theatre, Sacramento Opera, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Indiana Repertory Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum, Pasadena Playhouse, Asolo Theatre, Goodspeed Opera House, Syracuse Stage, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, American Repertory Theatre, Cincinnati Playhouse, Florida State Opera, Berkshire Theatre Festival, and many others. His lighting design of the Missouri Repertory Theatre production of Machinal was selected to represent American designers at the Scenography Exposition, Prague Quadrennial 2003. His awards include the Obie Award (NYC Off-Broadway) for Sustained Excellence in Lighting Design, the Villager Award (NYC Off-Off-Broadway) for outstanding Lighting Design of Before She Was Even Born, the Los Angeles Drama-Logue Award for Outstanding Achievement in Theatre for the lighting design of The Colored Museum at the Mark Taper Forum, Kansas City Drama Desk Award for Best lighting Design of The Deputy at the Missouri Repertory Theatre, The Sarasota & Manatee Critics’ SAMMY Award for Best Lighting Design of Nicholas Nickleby Pt. I & II at the Asolo Center for the Performing Arts, and a Maharam Citation for Lighting Design from the American Theatre Wing for Ntozake Shange’s A Photograph at the New York Shakespeare Festival.