Kathleen DeVault remembers being interested in Egypt even before she wrote a book report on the Pharoh Tutankhamun—popularly known as King Tut – when she was in fifth grade.
Now, DeVault, Ohio Northern University’s resident lighting designer/production manager, is heading to Egypt as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar for 2024-2025.
“I’ve always wanted to go to Egypt,” DeVault said. “I’ve been fascinated by the Pyramids and Egyptian culture. Archaeology was one of my minors in undergraduate.” An aunt, who spent time in Africa and visited the King Tut exhibit when it was in New York, also encouraged DeVault’s interest in the area.
The Fulbright program, which is administered through the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, offers prestigious and competitive fellowships that provide unique opportunities for scholars to teach and conduct research abroad. The scholars also help establish long-term relationships between people and nations.
Alumni of the Fulbright Program include 62 Nobel Laureates, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, 80 MacArthur Fellows, and thousands of leaders and world-renowned experts in academia and many other fields across the private, public and nonprofit sectors.
DeVault will be based in Egypt at a university with a performing arts program.
She is looking forward to teaching and researching lighting and sound design and stage production and plans to share her experiences with students when she returns. She also wants to set up some opportunities for her Egyptian students to connect with students at ONU via Zoom and possibly work on a project together.
At ONU, she has designed lights and sound for numerous productions, including “Elysium,” “Picnic,” “Magic Flute,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Tommy” and “Carousel.” She’s also been involved in International Play Festivals.
DeVault, who grew up in Bellefontaine, developed an interest in lighting design when she was an undergraduate at the Ohio State University.
“I went to study biology. I was going to go pre-med and do research. That was my plan.” She’d always been interested in the entertainment industry, but thought getting into it would be too challenging because she believed everybody was interested in those fields. A discussion with her roommate during her sophomore year led to an epiphany. “Why don’t you just do it?” her roommate asked.
DeVault started in the OSU theatre program. “I originally thought I was going to go into directing, but then I took my first lighting class. I decided, ‘Oh my God, this is it.’”
That class merged ideas from many subject areas like science and mathematics that she was interested in, she said. “I use the Pythagorean theorem all the time in lighting design.”
She went on to earn her MFA at the University of Massachusetts and expanded her skills to include sound design.
Lighting and sound design are key components of stage productions, DeVault said, even if they don’t get much attention. “I always tell people if you notice the lighting, we haven’t done our job.”
Costumes and scenery are more tactile, but DeVault always reminds her fundamentals class, she said, to not annoy the lighting designer because they can make you look horrible or fade into the background. All the components of a production need to work in harmony in telling the story, she added.