Nicole Pearce

The Washington Post

At this point, under Nicole Pearce’s lighting design, the stage glows like a nightclub in the devil’s basement.

Sarah L Kaufman 10/27/22

Chicago Tribune

“Colōrem” is therefore aesthetically striking (reinforced by dauntless lighting design from Nicole Pearce)

Lauren Warnecke 10/13/22

CVNC

Choreographed by Aszure Barton, with music by Ambrose Akinmusire, "Stillness" provided a showcase for many of Malpaso's extraordinary skills: holding leg extensions for implausibly long times and flowing into one another until they seem almost indistinguishable, the latter supported by lighting from Nicole Pearce.

Lynn Felder 4/23/22

Turning a Challenge into an Opportunity, This Lighting Designer Found a Purpose

Greg Houle 2/2022

Opera News

Mary Birnbaum’s clever production commenced as a semi-staged concert: the houselights up; the singers using music stands. As the evening progressed, the singers started going “off-book.” Bits of Kristen Robinson’s concert set started flying away, the houselights dimmed and Nicole Pearce’s lighting became increasingly expressive.

Fred Cohn 11/10/21

The New York Times

The glow of Nicole Pearce’s warm lighting also helps to create the sense that the dancers are flitting around, not on a stage, but in a garden, enchanted by their own merriment.

Gia Kourlas 10/25/19

The New York Times

Lighting designed by Nicole Pearce has the marvelous effect of transforming the geometrically patterned backdrop from sunny yellow to nocturnal blue, and back again.

-Alastair Macaulay 11/18/18

The Berkshire Eagle

The lighting design by the masterly Nicole Pearce creates an enigmatic, shadowy world which handsomely showcases Rachel Hauck's stage set-up.

-Janine Parker 8/17/18

Infinite Body

Program A opens with the Miller trio, state, where a knife-sharp trio of Black women--Kayla Farrish, Catherine Ellis Kirk and Marcella Lewis, with whom Miller collaborated--splash their stark images, live or via looming shadows, against the pale glow of a backdrop... Reggie Wilkins's music underscores a certain sci-fi otherworldliness in this picture as does Nicole Pearce's lighting design--but she's got even more astonishing ideas for Abraham's solo, INDY.

... We find him shuddering, his arms locked behind his back as if his wrists are handcuffed. Pearce's lighting, here and throughout, arrives from the oddest places and in the strangest ways. She is a fount of surprises, stepping up to the challenge of choreographer ready to surprise himself and all who follow him.

-Eva Yaa Asantewaa 5/2/18

The Boston Globe

A fascinating aspect of Lang’s work is that even on this stuffed program, each work feels unique. Between the visually rich dancing and the often striking use of lighting (most of it designed by the excellent Nicole Pearce) and/or unusual props, we seem to enter new realms with each dance. Lang’s hard-working, pleasing dancers perform with an easy, unaffected clarity.

-Janine Parker 7/6/17

ArtsJournal

Glow is a bright piece in several ways. The fine lighting designer Pearce collaborated with Lang on a neon tube extending on a diagonal that loops from the floor upward; over the course of the piece, it changes from white to yellow to pink.

-Deborah Jowitt 7/8/17

DC Metro Theater Arts

Director Jade King Carroll has crafted a lovely, graceful production that draws the viewer into Esther’s story with a minimum of fuss. Alexis Distler’s set design spreads six separate playing areas across two levels, creating an elegant look and allowing for quick scene transitions. She’s aided by Nicole Pearce’s lighting, which creates a pastoral backdrop for George’s missives from Panama

-Tim Dunleavy 5/20/17

The Chicago Tribune

It unfolds with hypnotic grace, the 17 dancers in shades of white and gray under Nicole Pearce's bright-white lighting, which magically manages nuance and shadow.

-Laura Molzahn 11/18/16

The New York Times

In the minuet third movement, men and women dance largely in concentric rings and in different styles. (The glow of Nicole Pearce’s lighting on center stage creates a feeling of magic, as if the dancers are circling an unseen grail.)

-Alastair Macaulay 6/3/15

Chicago Sun Times

Using the music of Mikael Karlsson, Ane Brun and Erik Satie, and the poetry of Christina Rossetti and Robert Louis Stevenson (with lighting, as it is throughout the program, by a magician named Nicole Pearce), this is a work at once wildly visceral, strangely dreamlike and endlessly surprising. - 2/13/14

The New York Times

Watching the multicolored lighting of Nicole Pearce play across the shiny white surfaces of the set provides an aesthetic pleasure in itself.
- Charles Isherwood 5/22/13

Show Business Weekly

Mina Lien’s striking set, a stark white rectangle, outlined in neon and standing on planks, which, thanks to Nicole Pearce’s evocative lighting, seems to float.
- Susan Dottino 5/22/13

The New Yorker Magazine

The director, Jonathan Bank, with the help of a rich, red-wallpapered set, by Vicki R. Davis, and superb, subtle lighting, by Nicole Pearce, creates a world in which longing seems tangible.
-  February 2013

New York Times

John McDermott’s set is as stark as a Nordic beach in winter. But the sound (by Leah Gelpe) and light (by Nicole Pearce) turn the stage into an endlessly churning sea.
- Ben Brantley New York Times on A Summer Day

The Times London UK

The lighting here as elsewhere was terrific and deserves a star all its own: Peter Mumford for Take Five, Nicole Pearce for Lyric Pieces, and Jan Hofstra for Grosse Fuge 
- Debra Craine on Lyric Pieces

Dance Europe

The aesthetically delightful design elements, with costumes by Michelle Jank and lighting by Nicole Pearce, and with an imposing set (by Barton, Jank, & Pearce) comprises a metres-high white canopy cascading down in waves, serving as a heavenly backdrop to the action.
-March, 2011 on Still Life

Time Out Chicago

The Muir’s final few, where one woman kneeling alone drops her gaze as darkness descends. (Once again Nicole Pearce nails it with the lighting.)
- by Zachary Whittenburg, February 2011

NY Times

Here, the lighting, by Nicole Pearce, created an otherworldly glow of silver and black..  
-by Gia Kourlas, Dec 20, 2010 on Busk

TheaterMania 

Lighting designer Nicole Pearce and sound designer Bart Fasbender also deserve praise for their contributions to how the war is visually and aurally reflected within the production.  
-by Dan Bacalzo, Nov 18, 2010 on Edgewise

Light & Sound 

Nicole Pearce's lighting design may be her finest achievement yet; she bathes the stage in faintly disturbing color washes (both pastel and saturated), transforms the space violently with spinning patterns, then snaps back to quotidian reality in nanoseconds.
- by David  Barbour, September 13, 2010 on underneathmybed

Time Out Chicago

Untouched is lit such that it appears we are looking onto a stage through its back wall. A heavy red curtain hangs, just partly opened, upstage. The floor is lit by shafts of light from beyond this curtain. There’s the sense another house, another audience, is back there sitting quietly, with only a small window onto the action we see clearly, thus, the work is our secret.  - - by Zachary Whittenberg, June 4, 2010

Time Out Chicago
Nicole Pearce’s lighting is more intriguing than any design the Joffrey’s premiered in years.
-by Zachary Whittenburg, April 29, 2010

Village Voice
...they come and go easily in an open field defined by Nicole Pearce's lighting
- Written August 25, 2009

Variety
The deep woods of Illinois seem to stretch into infinity, thick with vegetation, ablaze in fall colors and vibrating with the suggestive sounds of hunters and animal life -- a nice illusion advanced by Nicole Pearce's painterly lighting. - By Marilyn Statsio Setember 8, 2008

The New York Times
Nicole Pearce's wide range of modern lighting effects, sometimes silhouetting the dancers and shining lights at the audience, often lighting the dancers from new angles, kept changing the drama.
- Written December 18, 2007

The New York Times
For those of us who experience the Village as one crazily overpriced boutique after another, what a world this conjures: one of shadowy bars and tousled beds, in rooms decorated only by light striping the walls through shuttered blinds.

Noteworthy are Rachel Hauck’s spare set, Nicole Pearce’s lighting and a sound score
by Jill B C DuBoff...  Claudia La Rocco, October 2007

The Village Voice
On BAM's bare stage in Nicole Pearce's excellent lighting, with dancers crouching and lurking out of the action where the wings usually hang, the tension between safety and daring becomes tauter. – by Deborah Jowitt March 24, 2006

The New York Times
"All Fours," a dance set to Bartok whose sections for white-clad performers are endlessly fascinating, as is Nicole Pearce's lighting. – by Jennifer Dunning March 24, 2006

The Village Voice
Nicole Pearce's lighting strikes forcefully too. A red backdrop suddenly turns deep blue, and the stage chills; then the red returns. Some changes last only seconds. – by Deborah Jowitt June 15, 2004

The New York Times
The wildness of the first and last movements of the five-part score is translated into a raucous outburst for eight couples in black. These are contrasted with the three middle movements for two couples in either white or gray, depending on the boldness of Nicole Pearce’s lighting. – by Anna Kisselgoff June 10, 2004

Variety
Consistent invention and commitment mark Dickstein and team -- especially composer Vijay Iyer and lighting designer Nicole Pearce -- as talents to watch…  All three parts are stunningly lit by Pearce, who avoids both self-consciousness and excessive literalism in sculpting the dance space while giving the narrative realities their due.  – Bob Verini

The New York Times
The title "Little Willy" alludes to his sexual attributes, but the play is not as glib as that would suggest. It sticks for the most part to the agreed-upon facts, which give the hourlong show, lit noir-like on a mostly empty stage, a sense of authenticity, but by refusing to speculate about what we don't know… - By Jason Zinoman

Theatremania.com
Using nothing more than long, billowing panels of silk and mesmerizing lighting design by Nicole Pearce, the talented ensemble swirl around the innocent and forlorn young Bibi… 
- Barbara & Scott Siegel

Show Buisness Weekly
Nicole Pearce’s ghostly light design is at once strikingly beautiful and unbearably terrifying. – by Sean O’Donnell

Nytheatre.com
For this world premiere, Ma-Yi Theater Company has put together a splendid production… and evocative lighting by Nicole Pearce. – by Martin Denton

danceviewwest
Throughout All Fours, Nicole Pearce’s lighting suddenly falls dark, or flashes intense red. The blackness is unpredictable, swift as death. The sensation of shock is one we all, right now, know too well. The chorus is driven to a helpless fear. Your faith in the human will to find strength and calm in crisis is not strengthened. – by Rachel Howard

The Brooklyn Rail
... the image of vigor and exhaustion, rendered sculpturally by the dramatic and spare lighting of Nicole Pearce. – by MJ Thompson

Dance – Ballet Magazine
Dancer’s break off from the group and relationships form before they return to the whole. Nicole Pearce’s superb lighting simply adds to the feeling… - by David Mead

San Francisco Chronicle
…with briskly articulated lighting by Nicole Pearce, the dance is marked by high contrasts. – by Steven Winn