Designer Profile: Nicole Eng

Name: Nicole Eng

Title: Lighting & Production Designer 

Years Worked at VT: A little over 2 years – 2 years and 3 months.

Favorite Project: My favorite Project is [an NDA hospitality project] – since I grew up with the IP I thought it was really cool to work on the project because I know the IP well. I was able to have a better sense of the project because I felt like I had more of a personal connection with it. 

Tell us your funniest or most memorable memory at Visual Terrain: 1. All of us in the office had a loong discussion on whether a hot dog was a sandwich. We did a lot of debating and eventually found out that there is a cube rule of food where every food can be put into 6 categories, and a hot dog is indeed a sandwich. Ruth Bader Ginsburg agrees, look it up.  

2. It was winter, and I remember coming upstairs one day and seeing 20 colorful tinsel trees around Steven’s desk. It turns out he had stayed late the night before to set them all up! We found bits of tinsel around the office for the next several months.

Favorite Aspect of Lighting Design: I like how collaborative it is between all of the disciplines no matter what project it is. You don’t necessarily have to have a good lighting design, but I think that good lighting design has a big impact on everyone else’s work, and working with other disciplines to reach a common goal is a lot of fun.

What or Who Inspires You: The ultimate end user or guest. Our part in a project can have a big impact on a guest’s experience. We design for the guest, and I’m inspired by the possibility of creating a world for guests to enter and having my work be a part of their lives.

Fun Fact About Yourself that No One Knows: Something that not many people know is that I like to go rock climbing and I take aerial silk classes! Something that no one knows is that since the start of quarantine, I’ve crocheted over 50 stuffed animals that I’m planning on donating to my Mom’s school and her pre-k students. (About half of them are shown in the picture.)

What is your favorite part about being a lighting designer? I would say the people that I work with. All of us at Visual Terrain are theater people and while we have similarities we’re still very different. Theater people are a specific breed and I don’t think I would have met the same kind of interesting people that I would have if I wasn’t in this field of work.