Alice Prussin
IALD Professional Member
Principal

Alice Prussin founded APLD/Illuminosa in 1998 with over fifteen years experience working with light. Her fascination with light has included lighting for dance, theatre and performance art, light art sculpture installations, photograms, photography, and research on vision and perception.

Thrown into running a lighting board for a small dance performance, Alice discovered her passion and has never looked back. Her move to New York in 1986 to attend the MFA program in architectural lighting design allowed her to synthesize her theatrical lighting passion and experience with a fascination of the built environment.

As principal, Alice works closely with the design team to establish the design vision and direction for our projects. She has a well-earned reputation among architects and clients for her penetrating vision and collaborative design style. While welcoming work from a large range of project types, Alice feels most passionately about bringing quality lighting design to the public, as shown by her emphasis on libraries, schools, houses of worship, affordable housing and streetscape projects. She has been a champion of daylighting systems and controls, always balancing sustainability needs with aesthetic and cost considerations.

Prior to starting her own firm, Alice gained her lighting design experience working at the Temporary Contemporary in Los Angeles, designing lighting and projections for live performances, and working with notable bay area lighting designers Richard Peters and David Malman.

She has presented design workshops at the global PLD conference in London, Lightfair, and the Enlighten Conference for the IALD. She has taught lighting design for U.C. Berkeley extension and spoken at statewide conferences on green design for high performance schools. Most recent publications include an article in Architectural Record’s lighting issue about the Los Gatos Public Library. She is actively working on establishing a graduate level architectural lighting design program in the Bay Area.