Damien Cooper

Lighting Designer 

Damien is a lighting designer working in theatre, opera and dance. He has designed over 600 shows.

Damien’s career highlights include Neil Armfield’s production of the Ring cycle for Opera Australia; Exit the King on Broadway, directed by Neil Armfield; Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake for the Australian Ballet, which was presented in New York, London, Paris and Tokyo; Keating! The Musical; and Australian Dance Theatre’s Birdbrain, which played over 60 venues around the world.

Damien works with many leading dance companies in Australia and his work has toured extensively around the globe. Highlights include Ocho, Grand, Air and Other Invisible Forces and Orb for Sydney Dance Company; set and lights for Shaun Parker Company’s Am I; lighting design for Tasdance’s Affinity; Chunky Move’s Mortal Engine; Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Of Earth and Sky; Stalker Theatre Company’s Shanghai Lady Killer; Universal Ballet’s Giselle; Australian Dance Theatre’s The Age of Unbeauty, The Beginning of Nature, Habitus and Be Your Self; and The Australian Ballet’s The Happy Prince, Murphy, Romeo and Juliet, Firebird and The Narrative of Nothing.

Damien’s opera credits include A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Houston Grand Opera, Canadian Opera Company and Lyric Opera Chicago; The Magic Flute for Lyric Opera Chicago; Chorus! and Peter Grimes for HGO and Canadian Opera Company; and The Merry Widow, Madama Butterfly, Aida, Cosí fan tutte, Alcina, The Magic Flute, Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung for Opera Australia.

Lighting design for feature films Mao’s Last Dancer and Dance Academy.

Damien has won three Sydney Theatre Awards for Best Lighting Design and four Green Room awards for Best Lighting Design. He won the Australian Production Designers Guild inaugural Award for Lighting Design for his work on Opera Australia’s Ring cycle, and the Showreelfinder Award for Live Performance Lighting Design for The Glass Menagerie at Belvoir.

Bio taken from the last program in which Damien appears.