Daniel H. Jentzen is a lighting designer, production designer, programmer, cinematographer, photographer, researcher, and teacher. He has created lighting and/or stage designs for over 800 plays, musicals, concerts, broadcasts, and special events including Oprah, Hillary Clinton, Stephen Hawking, LL Cool J, Brandi Carlile, Alison Krauss, Conan O’Brien, En Vogue, Chaka Khan, Anaïs Mitchell, Steve McQueen, Dierks Bentley, Eden Espinosa, Christine Ebersole, Kelli O’Hara, Brian Stokes Mitchell, the Huntington Theatre Company, the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, Vice Media, Google, and Disney.
He specializes in concerts, dance, or any type of show with music involved, and in high-profile live+broadcast events that look great to a live audience while being correctly lit for camera. He designs in Vectorworks and Unreal and programs ETC Eos and GrandMA control systems.
In 2013, Dan founded Brighter Boston, a nonprofit organization that gives teenagers paid internships backstage on professional shows. He also teaches lighting design at Boston Arts Academy, the city’s public arts high school, and helped design and build the school’s state-of-the-art performing arts center and teaching facility. He ran the 2025 Boston Marathon to raise money for the school.
Dan currently teaches lighting design at Emerson College and has also taught at Salem State University and given guest lectures at Boston University and MIT. He’s also a teaching artist with Boston Lyric Opera.
He’s currently writing a book on education and doing research on multisensory perception, exploring how time-based art can help us understand signaling in the brain.
Dan holds a BFA in Drama from Carnegie Mellon and an Ed.M. in Education & Neuroscience from Harvard. He’s an avid hiker, rock climber, snowboarder, and dad.
