Lighting designer Simon Rossiter makes every dancer shine

"Every person who is on stage has to be beautiful."

For every performance, an entire team works tirelessly behind the scenes to make every artist look their best on stage. One integral role that helps everything come together is the lighting design. Simon Rossiter is a Toronto-based, award-winning Lighting Designer who has lit countless NBS performances. Most recently, he worked with choreographer Esie Mensah to light ESHI at the 2025 Spring Showcase.

For Simon, who generously shared insights into his creative process, “Lighting is a character within the world. It needs to have a voice and it needs to be a voice that complements the work.” When it comes to lighting a diverse cast of people, Simon shares, “It is about seeing the people and taking the time to really be aware of all the skin tones and gradations of intensity that you see, and being able to respond to that. ...Often, we think about skin as a single layer and we think about colour as a single layer, but it is actually all of these underlying components. Skin, like everything, has all of these deep nuances and you can start to play with the color in a very different way. Every person who is on stage has to be beautiful.”

Lighting design is just one of the many ways we can centre equity in ballet and support the growth of an art form that reflects the full richness of Canada and its peoples.

View photos of ESHI from the 2025 Spring Showcase:







Photos by Karolina Kuras.