HONOR FOR A PRINCETONIAN: Jane Cox, left, shown here with her daughter Beckett Alexander, was awarded the 2024 Tony Award for Best Lighting Design of a Play. (Photo courtesy Jane Cox)

On June 16, Jane Cox, director of Princeton University’s Lewis Center Program in Theater and Music Theater, won the 2024 Tony Award for Best Lighting Design of a Play for her work on Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play, Appropriate.

This is Cox’s fourth nomination and first win. Appropriate received the Tony for Best Revival of a Play. Jacobs-Jenkins is a member of Princeton’s Class of 2006 and of the Lewis Center’s Advisory Council, and has taught in the Theater Program at Princeton. The production garnered a third Tony, for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play, for Sarah Paulson.

“I’m so delighted to win a Tony for working on a play by one of the greatest writers of our time — Princeton alum Branden Jacobs-Jenkins,” said Cox. “This brilliant, provocative and haunted play is an incredible vehicle for design, calling for precision and imagination in getting light into this metaphorical and literally dark space. It was also delightful to be in the company of several Princeton folks, including the incredible alum Jeff Kuperman, Class of 2012, whose choreography (along with brother Rick) for the Tony-winning musical The Outsiders was brilliantly displayed during the awards ceremony.”

Cox also recently won a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lighting Design of a Play for her work on Appropriate.

“We are thrilled to congratulate Jane on her much-deserved Tony win,” said Judith Hamera, chair of the Lewis Center. “Her nationally renowned excellence as an artist is of a piece with her outstanding teaching and dedicated service to the Lewis Center for the Arts and to the University.”

Appropriate follows the dysfunctional Lafayette family as they return to a decaying plantation mansion in Arkansas to battle over their recently deceased father’s inheritance.

Cox designs lighting for theater, opera, dance, and music. Her other recent lighting design work includes Michael R. Jackson’s and Anna K. Jacobs’ Teeth at Playwrights Horizons; The Marriage of Figaro at San Francisco Opera; Fefu and her Friends at Theater for a New Audience in New York City, directed by Princeton alum Lileana Blain-Cruz; King Lear with Glenda Jackson on Broadway, directed by Sam Gold; a new musical adaptation of Secret Life of Bees; The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, directed by former Princeton faculty member John Doyle; a theatrical adaptation of the Ta-Nehisi Coates book Between The World and Me, directed by Kamilah Forbes; and a revival of True West on Broadway, directed by British director James McDonald.

A Princeton resident, Cox has been a company member of the Monica Bill Barnes Dance Company for 20 years. She has served on the faculty at Princeton since 2007, and became director of the Program in Theater and Music Theater in 2016.