BIO

Joe Levasseur is originally from New Hampshire and is a graduate of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts with a degree in Lighting Design. His primary focus is lighting and production for contemporary dance and performance. His designs have been seen throughout the United States, Europe, and South America.

Levasseur has worked extensively within New York City’s vibrant dance community. From 2002 to 2010, he was the touring lighting director for John Jasperse Company, co-designing just two dancers, CALIFORNIA, Prone, Becky, Jodi, and John, Misuse liable to prosecution, and Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking and Flat Out Lies. He was a long-term collaborator with Pavel Zuštiak and Palissimo through 2018. Since 2009, he has maintained a deeply collaborative relationship with Big Dance Theater, designing works including Comme Toujours Here I Stand, Kürbisgeist, The Road Awaits Us, Alan Smithee Directed This Play, The Mood Room, and 17c.

Levasseur has designed for Christopher Williams Dance with The Golden Legend, Narcissus (Bessie Award nomination with costume/scenic designer Andrew Jordan), Wolf-in-Skins, Les Sylphides, and Jeux. His ongoing work with Meredith Monk includes Cellular Songs (presented at BAM) and Indra’s Net at the Park Avenue Armory. Since 2012, he has been a lighting designer for the Lang Dance program at The New School. He also serves as Lighting Supervisor for the Trisha Brown Dance Company.

Additional credits include Edge (off-Broadway), numerous plays at the Brick Theater, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ experimental piece A Lighting Design. In 2014, he lit Georg Friedrich Haas’ opera ATTHIS for Opera Cabal and ACME at The Kitchen, and in 2012, designed Space Program: MARS by Tom Sachs at the Park Avenue Armory. From 2009 to 2014, he taught a lighting design intensive as part of Movement Research’s MELT Summer Festival at Abrons Arts Center. He was also the Technical Director for CATS: The Jellicle Ball at PAC-NYC.

Beyond performance, Levasseur explores painting and sculpture in his personal creative practice. His Drop Clock installation was shown at Dance Theater Workshop (now New York Live Arts) in 2009. He exhibited original paintings at Performance Space 122 in 2010 and was commissioned to create a mural for AUNTS in 2013.

Levasseur received a New York Dance and Performance ‘Bessie’ Award in 2008 “for lighting a vast range of work this season and providing deeply integral visual environments, textures, moods, and effects, in projects of every scale, at nearly every venue in the city.” He received a second Bessie in 2010 for Big Dance Theater’s Comme Toujours Here I Stand, and was honored with a Knight of Illumination Award in 2018 for his work on Meredith Monk’s Cellular Songs.

He lives in Brooklyn, NY.