Valentina Cruz is a Colombian-Canadian lighting designer who arrived in Canada on a graduate scholarship to Concordia University and never left. Her designs are characterised by a warmth and specificity that comes from years of working in theatre spaces with limited equipment — she learned early that constraints produce solutions, and that the best lighting designs tend to look as though they cost considerably more than they did. She has designed for Cahoots Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille, the Belfry, and the National Arts Centre, and has built a reputation for lighting that is quietly attentive to the emotional temperature of a scene without ever announcing itself.
