Sarah Woods
Resident NAE Lighting Designer
Sarah Woods is the Resident Lighting Designer of New American Ensemble. Her first production with NAE was The Brothers Karamazov at The Stag & Lion Theatre in 2025. Sarah has designed the lighting for all productions since, including the critically acclaimed production of Chekhov’s Ivanov, and The Just for the NAE Summer Student Ensemble. Continuing her collaboration with director Michael DeFilippis, she provided lighting consultancy for the 2026 Edinburgh Fringe Festival run of 44 Minutes by Lev Steinberg. Sarah graduated with highest honors from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2022, where she studied under the mentorship of two-time Tony Award-winning lighting designer Donald Holder, whom she has now assisted many times on productions including the Tony-Winning Best Musical Schmigadoon!, as well as The Great Qin, a Chinese dance spectacular in Xi’an, China which holds the Guinness World Record for “largest theater stage” at over 47,000 square feet. She is a proud member of United Scenic Artists Local 829.