Beverly Emmons to Receive The Ming Cho Lee Award for Lifetime Achievement

Lighting designer Beverly Emmons will be honored with the Ming Cho Lee Award for Lifetime Achievement in Design bestowed by the Henry Hewes Design Awards at the 60th annual ceremony on October 21. A five-time honoree of the Hewes Awards for six productions dating back to The Elephant Man in 1979, Emmons has 33 Broadway credits and nearly four dozen Off Broadway designs that have made a profound impact on theatre culture for nearly five decades.

"We are delighted to celebrate the extraordinary career of Beverly Emmons," says Jeffrey Eric Jenkins, chairman of The Henry Hewes Design Awards Committee. "She has been in the forefront of lighting design for decades and we are proud to present her with the 2024 Ming Cho Lee Award for Lifetime Achievement in Design."

Emmons has designed for Broadway, Off-Broadway, Regional Theater, Dance and Opera. Her Broadway credits include Annie Get Your Gun, Jekyll & Hyde, The Heiress, Stephen Sondheim's Passion and The Elephant Man. Her lighting of Amadeus won a Tony award. She has worked at The Kennedy Center, the Guthrie Theatre, Arena Stage, and The Alley. Off Broadway she worked with Joseph Chaikin and Meredith Monk. She worked with Robert Wilson on Einstein on the Beach and other projects. Her designs for dance include works by Martha Graham, Trisha Brown, Alvin Ailey, and Merce Cunningham. She has been awarded seven Tony nominations, two Bessies, an Obie for Distinguished Lighting, and five Maharam/American Theater Wing Design Awards (now known as the Henry Hewes Design Awards). She has curated TheLightingArchive.org, which makes historical lighting documents accessible to students and scholars on the Internet.

Legendary theatre designer Ming Cho Lee was the first recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Henry Hewes Design Awards, and the award was renamed for him at that presentation ceremony. Lee, who designed more than 300 productions across the globe, received a Tony Award in 1983 for K2 and taught for 48 years at the Yale School of Drama. He was also the recipient of a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2013.

Lee was honored with three other Henry Hewes Design Awards: the first for the 1964 production of Electra for Shakespeare in the Park, the second for Ergo in 1968 at the Public Theater, and the last for K2 in 1983, for which he also received Tony, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics' Circle Awards. Lee, who passed in 2020, was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 1998 and received the National Medal of Arts in 2002.