Header: Courtesy of LIT Lighting Design Awards
The LIT Lighting Design Awards, an annual competition that rewards lighting projects and lighting products, has presented the jury for its 2026 edition. Nineteen names have been announced so far, from lighting studios, concert tours, television, a university and the lighting press.
Ten years of LIT
The LIT Awards were first held in 2017, which makes this the prestigious awards’ tenth edition. They are run from Switzerland by 3C Awards, as a sister award of the SIT Furniture Design Award, the BLT Built Design Awards, the LIV Hospitality Design Awards, and many others. Last year’s edition was able to draw more than 1,000 entries from 62 countries, and in June the award celebrated its first decade with a ceremony on the Seine in Paris.
From winners to judges
Three of the jurors know the award from the other side, such as Martin Döller, Jan Goderis and Sally Storey. Döller founded the South African lighting brand One to One and won last year’s product title with his Amphora light; Goderis was among last year’s winners with his Solid desk lamp, and Storey received the award’s Lifetime Achievement prize in 2020, having joined the jury the following year. She first became interested in light as an architecture student at Bristol University and she now leads Lighting Design International and John Cullen Lighting in London.
Several jurors came to lighting through architecture. Claudia Paz, for example, discovered it in her last year of architecture school in Lima, where she taught herself lighting design. She opened her studio in 2001 and has since lit the Government Palace of Peru and the country’s National Stadium. Orlando Marques, from Brazil, trained as an architect at KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where he now returns as a guest lecturer. He runs his own practice, OMstudio Lighting, and was once editor-in-chief of the Brazilian magazine L+D. Bahare Yaghar Knowles grew up in Tehran and has lived in Dubai for the past 15 years, where she has worked with hotel brands such as Four Seasons, Marriott and Ritz-Carlton, and recently co-founded the studio Collective 66.
Andrea Siniscalco took the academic route, having graduated in industrial design in 2002 with a thesis on lights for workplaces without windows. A year later, he began teaching and researching at the lighting laboratory of the Politecnico di Milano, where he is now an associate professor. The Danish designer Kasper Hammer went into products, having studied light at The Bartlett in London and later worked as product and design director at Louis Poulsen before opening his own studio.
On the entertainment side of the industry, the awards rounded up Roland Greil, Cosmo Wilson, Sooner Routhier, David Bishop, Sophya Acosta, Clint Dulieu and Zach Blane. Greil started lighting club bands in Germany and Austria after school and has since worked with Adele and The Rolling Stones alongside Woodroffe Bassett Design, co-designed the lighting for a Rammstein stadium tour and worked on the Eurovision Song Contest. Wilson, from the United States, has worked with more than 40 bands, among them AC/DC, Aerosmith and Iron Maiden. Routhier, who runs the studio The Playground, has created stage moments for Coldplay, The Weeknd and Rihanna.
Bishop trained in lighting design at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and went on to win two BAFTAs for his television work. His work includes the lighting for the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and for the funerals of Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II. Acosta studied stage lighting in Argentina and now runs her studio between Buenos Aires and Barcelona, having worked with Cirque du Soleil and with the company that broadcasts the Olympic Games. Dulieu, from Australia’s Gold Coast, worked on the technical design of Vector Lights, a light show on Auckland Harbour Bridge. Finally, Blane completes the group with work at Carnegie Hall and at OperaSofia in Bulgaria.
The last four jurors to have been announced are Thiago Gaya, Randy Reid, Esther Torelló and Amit Gupta. Gaya publishes L+D, the magazine Marques used to edit, and founded LEDforum, a well-known lighting conference in São Paulo. Reid started his career at GE Lighting in 1983 and now runs designing lighting and a digital magazine he launched in 2020. Torelló edited the Spanish magazine IDL for 13 years before founding Lightecture, and Gupta founded STIRworld, a design and architecture publication from India, in 2014.
The jury is completed by Tupac Martir, Founder and Artist at Satore Studio; Mary Rushton-Beales, Principal and Founder of Lighting Design House; Annamaria Lambri, Chair of the Department of Interior Design and Associate Professor of Interior Design at the American University in Dubai; John Bullock, Publisher and Editor of The Light Review; Katia Kolovea, Founder and Creative Director of Archifos; Yah Li Toh, Principal of Light Collab; Jason Wang, Secretary-General of the Asia Pacific Design Center (APDC); Leah Xandora, Project Director at L’Observatoire International; Bradley King, Lighting Designer at Bradley King Lighting Design; Natalia Bystriantseva, Head of RULD, the Creative Association of Lighting Designers Russia; and Adele Locke, Founder and Principal Designer of MINT Lighting Design.
The judging process
To keep the judging fair, every project reaches the jury anonymously and in random order. Furthermore, the jurors are given only the categories that match their own field, so a concert lighting designer will judge stage work and a product designer will judge lamps. Each project is then scored between 10 and 100 points on criteria such as innovation, looks, how well the design works, its durability and its effect on the environment.
If you want to be part of this celebration of excellence in lighting design, be sure to send your project by the 30th of September. Entries are open in three fields: Architectural Lighting Design, Entertainment Lighting Design and Lighting Product Design. Projects can be entered as finished work, as work in progress or as concepts, as long as they are no more than five years old.
