Jean Rosenthal
Lighting Designer
History of Jean Rosenthal
Lighting legend
Rosenthal also won her first award at Yale University(Henrietta Lord Memorial Award). Her parents, who emigrated from Romania in the 1880s, were both children of Jewish tailors. An unconventional family for the time, both parents worked as medical doctors, her father as an ear, nose, and throat specialist, her mother, as a psychiatrist.
Rosenthal did the stage lighting for a number of well-known Broadway plays and musicals, such as West Side Story (1957), Becket (1960), Hello, Dolly! (1964), Hamlet (1964), Fiddler on the Roof (1964), The Odd Couple(1965), and Cabaret (1966). In the last weeks of her life, suffering from cancer and confined to a wheelchair, Rosenthal designed the lighting for her final Graham piece. Until her death in New York City, on May l, 1969, Rosenthal lived a “lifetime in light.”