Alumni from Theatre and Dance, Studio Art find the best lighting for storytelling

Kent Sprague ’14 and Kathryne Hall ’99 make other people’s work look good for a living. Both collaborate with others to produce finished material consumed by large audiences. Both require as much business acumen as they do creative prowess. Yet their areas of expertise are fundamentally different. Using theatrical and editorial talents, respectively, they create visuals—on stages and “pages”—to help tell a story effectively.

Sprague, a freelance lighting professional and founder of production company Sovereign Candle Collective in New York City, majored in theatre and dance at Wooster and has lit more than 300 stage productions, museum exhibits, interactive displays, and events. In the theatre, Sprague makes choices about how the stage should look, then implements and programs the lights so everything matches the mood of the show. A more intriguing line of work, though less straightforward, happens with interactive exhibits, architecture, and museums where people actually experience the environment he’s created.

Sprague programmed 2024 holiday shows at Busch Gardens Williamsburg in Virginia.

“Lighting elevates other collaborators,” said Sprague, alluding to gallery artists, stage performers, scenic designers, and others. “It’s tricky because we’re often the last ones in the room, but we also have to draw everything together.” For example, his color choices, angles, directionality, and intensity levels of light help convey an actor’s on-stage emotion for someone seated in the last row of the balcony. Lighting a space full of art, on the other hand, must be powerful enough to avoid shadows from onlookers, while also feeling effortless. “You don’t want people to notice the process,” he said. “It’s about seeing the artwork, not the lighting.”

The Blue Paradox at Chicago’s Griffin Museum of Science and Industry is an interactive exhibit that invites people to experience the ocean plastic crisis in person. “As a programmer, I coordinated the lighting with interactions,” said Sprague. “A lot of it is really subtle, like when someone opens a door the lights shift color, but it makes a huge difference to the whole experience. It’s a lot of fun (and frustration) to dial in perfectly.”

Global superstar Zendaya poses with Hall and her team at an Allure cover shoot.

Meanwhile, as visuals director at Allure, SELF, and previously Glamour, Hall decides how to bring stories to life. A studio art major focused in photography at Wooster, she developed a creative approach to visual strategy and has honed her techniques at two of the world’s most influential fashion and beauty brands for the past 10 years. She hires photographers for stylized images and illustrators to create conceptual art, oversees photoshoot production, and collaborates with an art team to determine the layout, which shifted in recent years from print magazines to digital publishing, with the exception of Allure’s “Best of Beauty” issue. It’s not all about the beauty, though: Hall also manages the visuals budget and all contracts.

“Editorial allows for more creativity than I think any other role in the photo and design fields,” said Hall. “You’re constantly changing the story you’re working on, and each project is a new opportunity to think outside the box.” If she’s featuring a cover star for “Women of the Year,” she considers what they find most interesting about the star and who best to photograph that. Perhaps it’s heroism or maybe joy. When she visualized an investigative package on egg freezing, she chose custom illustrations of an icy egg-shaped timer and a stork carrying an icy cooler instead of photography of women and practitioners in a clinic, which are less interesting and less specific.

Hall loves being on set and seeing what her contractors and designers come up with. She also enjoys being part of the pop culture. “I know what we consumed as teenagers or college students and love being the person who’s making that work for the next generation,” she said.

Featured Image: Allure’s Best of Beauty cover story photoshoot with Billie Eilish was “a special day” for Hall (third from left). Photo by Cho Gi-Seok.

This feature originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of Wooster magazine.

Photos provided by Hall and Sprague.

Posted in Alumni, Magazine on March 13, 2025.