ETC West has a new team member

ETC's Hollywood-based office has just hired R. Christopher Stokes to serve as its newest field project coordinator. As an FPC, he will help ETC West support the theatrical, rigging, architectural and broadcast markets in the western United States and Canada, including the busy Los Angeles and Las Vegas regions.

Stokes was awarded an MFA in lighting design in 2010 from the California Institute of the Arts in Northridge, after earning a BA in theatre with minors in philosophy and computer science from Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, in 2006. He was chosen to be a lighting intern at the Los Angeles Opera, as part of the Wally Russell Lighting Internship program. There, Stokes worked as a second assistant, updating lighting plots, drafting, creating focus charts and doing the tracking for moving lights. 

In 2013, Stokes helped open the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, a community arts center in Beverly Hills that stages dance, musical and theatrical performances, and worked as the venue's technical director. He also had a hand in opening the Valley Performing Arts Center on the campus of California State University, where he served as technical director. His résumé also includes experience teaching introductory lighting and technical theater courses at Bucknell University and CalArts, as well as mentoring high school students with lighting designs and supervising college work-study programs.

For the past several years, Stokes has done freelance lighting design. Recent credits include the Actors' Gang Theatre Company's 2013 tour of Tartuffe ; After It Happened at the Odyssey Theatre, Better at the Atwater Village Theatre, and Cinnamon Girl at the Greenway Court Theatre in Los Angeles; Euripides' Helen at the Getty Villa in Malibu; Sweet Karma at The Grove Theatre Company in Upland, California; Recycling: Washing Tales at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and The Sonneteer at the Village Theater in Hollywood. Stokes has also worked as an assistant lighting designer to Tony® Award-winning lighting designer Donald Holder on productions, such as Spiderman: Turn off the Dark , the Broadway revival of Promises, Promises , the Lion King national tour, Happiness at Lincoln Center, and the first and second seasons of the television show Smash .