Eric Van Tassell

Eric Van Tassell teaches in the Department of Dance and the Department of Theatre at Hope College in Holland, MI and serves in both departments as a designer and technician for a plethora of productions throughout the academic year. He relishes the opportunity to train students in the classroom, as co-leader of the Arts Technical Staff and as an individual mentor on specific projects. His courses include Stage Production 1, Lighting Design, Intro to Theatre, and theatre labs in lighting and sound design. He joined the Hope faculty in 2019.

Eric has 15 years of experience working on stages ranging from exploratory storefront theaters in Chicago to The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. He loves collaborating with passionate teams to create engaging work.

He formerly served as the lighting director for The Sharon L. Morse Performing Arts Center and resident lighting designer for The Studio Theatre at Tierra Del Sol in The Villages, Florida. At “The Sharon” he hosted world renowned performers including classic rock bands, dance companies and Broadway touring companies, while at The Studio he worked with a team of designers and artists to create resident productions ranging from intimate two-person plays to expansive musicals.

For a decade between college and graduate school, Eric was based in Chicago where his artistic home was the now-closed Oracle Theatre. There he served as lighting designer for productions of The Ghost Sonata, The Mother, The America Play, Romulus, The President and mainstage productions of Radio Goggles, Woyzeck and Termen Vox Machina. Among his additional Chicago credits are Chalk (Sideshow Theatre), Genesis (Definition Theatre), A Midsummer Night's Dream (Strange Loop Theatre), Bard Fiction (Commedia Beauregard), Beautiful Broken (Broken Nose Theatre) and They Are Dying Out (Trap Door Theatre). While primarily a lighting and sound designer, Eric comes from a directing background. His most prominent directorial work was the 2012 Chicago production of A Klingon Christmas Carol with Commedia Beauregard, for which he also designed the lighting.

Eric continues to work beyond the campus of Hope College. Recent design credits include Nana Does Vegas, and Clue with Meadow Brook Theatre outside Detroit and The Enchantment as a project through Collaborations of Merritt 2021 and The Michael Merritt Awards. Additionally during the summer of 2021 his work could be seen lighting a group of Hope College dance students at the Dance in the Desert festival in Las Vegas.

PRESS

"[With] Eric Van Tassell's grungy lighting washing over actors and audience alike, we are directly implicated in the struggle." -- Chicago Tribune

"Eric Van Tassell’s lighting is evocative." -- Queens Chronicle

“Eric Van Tassell’s lighting design does heavy lifting as well, with booms that create shadows as if lighting dance[s], augmenting the introduction of Achilles, for example, by making him large as a projected image of Trask's body. Bold shifts from red to blue to gold delineate mood and heighten drama…” -- Revue West Michigan

“And as complicated as the lighting design was, it was all perfectly executed.” -- Encore Michigan

"Set designer Mike Mroch and lighting designer Eric Van Tassell create an elegant abattoir." -- Time Out Chicago

"Lighting designer Eric Van Tassell [and the rest of the design team] manifest the bizarre reality with remarkable and stunning vision." -- Chicago Stage Review

"Eric Van Tassell’s side lighting creates the shadows familiar to German Expressionism." -- Stage and Cinema

"Eric Van Tassell's lighting design, with its bleary reds and blues, melds perfectly with the projection images..." -- Chicago Theater Beat