BIO

Joe Levasseur is originally from New Hampshire and is a graduate of 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 all over the United States, Europe, and South America.

Levasseur has worked extensively with artists in the “downtown” dance field. He was the touring lighting director from 2002 until 2010 for John Jasperse Company, for which he co-designed just two dancers, CALIFORNIA, Prone, Becky, Jodi, and John, Misuse liable to prosecution, and Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking and Flat Out Lies. He has been a long-term collaborator with Pavel Zuštiak and his company Palissimo, designing every new piece since 2003. He has regularly worked with Big Dance Theater since 2009, and designed Restless Creature, Wendy Whelan’s first post-ballet life work featuring duets with Alejandro Cerrudo, Joshua Beamish, Kyle Abraham, and Brian Brooks. He also had the pleasure to work with choreographers Ishmael Houston-Jones, Jennifer Monson, and Sally Silvers among many others. He has been the lighting designer for the Joyce Theater’s NY Quadrille series. 

He has also designed a number of plays at the Brick Theater, as well as the off-Broadway play Edge. He was the lighting designer for the work in progress piece A Lighting Design by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. In 2014 he lit the Georg Friedrich Haas’ opera ATTHIS by Opera Cabel and ACME at the Kitchen. From 2009 to 2014, Levasseur taught a week-long lighting design intensive for the dance community at Abrons Arts Center through Movement Research’s MELT Summer Festival. He also lit Tom Sach’s Space Program: MARS at the Park Avenue Armory.  

Not long after coming to New York, Levasseur began to experiment with painting and sculpture as part of a personal creative practice. In 2009, his Drop Clock installation was featured in the lobby of Dance Theater Workshop (New York Live Arts). In 2010 he showed a collection of original paintings at Performance Space 122, and in 2013 was commissioned to paint an original mural for AUNTS.

Levasseur received a 2008 New York Dance and Performance 'Bessie' Award “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.” That year, he was a collaborator in Basic Assembly (with Ashleigh Leite, Ben Asriel, and Keith Skretch) creating the the content, design and performance of Game On, a multimedia performance piece at the Chocolate Factory, NYC. In 2010, he won a second ‘Bessie’ for his work on Big Dance Theater’s Comme Toujours Here I Stand.  In 2018 he won a Knight of Illumination award for his work on Meredith Monk’s Cellular Songs. 

Ongoing lighting design engagements include: Meredith Monk, Big Dance Theater, and Palissimo.

Levasseur lives in Brooklyn, NY