Meet the Artists
Illumination 2025 Fall
Festival Light Artists
Clerestory Light
Chris Bocchiaro, Zach Dobryn,
Greg Hanson, and Megan Kinneen
THE WOODS ARE CALLING
Clerestory Light is an interdisciplinary design and production studio specializing in creating unique immersive experiences and dynamic landmarks. With backgrounds in theatre, music, technology, architecture, anthropology, and public history, we seek out the spirit of special places and help to tell their stories. Our place-based work finds inspiration in the natural and built environments where it will be installed. Through exploration and collaboration, we distil the elemental narratives of each place and illustrate them through original music synchronized with dynamic light. Our work transforms environments, conjuring the colors of spring in the midwinter, or the traces of magic in the quotidian. This transformation highlights the inherent beauty in each place, and the mission of those who care for them.
Robert Montenegro
COLORAMA DREAMS
Roberto Montenegro is a queer Los Angeles born, NYC based digital artist who uses video as his medium. Starting his career as an aerospace engineer for the US government, Roberto now creates and animates original video content specifically designed to inspire and awe audiences for live events and concerts. His expertise ranges from 2D and 3D animation and visualization, stage design, and creative direction in multimedia. For the past 15 years Roberto has worked all over the world on shows for Gay Pride New York, Art Basel, and Ultra Music Festival. He has been the creative director for The Pines Party for the past seven years. Roberto cofounded the Free Radical Design Group with his partner, Guy J Smith.
Michael Crawbuck and Mickey Santana
THE GLASS GARDEN PAVILION
The Glass Garden Pavilion is a celebration of the LGBTQIA+ community’s perseverance in the face of New York City gay bar raids and closures in the 1960s. At that time, Mayor Robert F. Wagner was determined to “clean up” the city in the lead up to the 1964 World’s Fair, leveraging the police and the law to shut down gay bars. As more queer spaces were forced to close, the community resisted with pivotal demonstrations at bars like Julius’ and The Stonewall Inn. This garden pays tribute to these acts of defiance with illuminated glass flowers growing out of the broken bottles from these shuttered establishments. The flowers dance to songs that may have played in those bars at the time. Guests are encouraged to join in with the dancing lights by using disco ball watering cans to water the garden and make it shine even brighter. The Glass Garden Pavilion is a showcase of queer liberation in the late 20th century, illuminating a path forward for generations to blossom.
Joe Petrowski
FAN-tastic
Joe Petrowski is a creative designer who specializes in imaginative lighting design. Joe can be found creating memorable moments for thousands of spectators through dazzling and spectacular lighting displays and installations or creating visual elements at a nightclub. Joe has collaborated with various musical artists and production companies creating unique entertainment experiences. Credits include Art Bath, The Saint at Large, The Pines Party, Fever, The Q, Laissez Faire, Mission Nightclub, Hearsay, Knockdown Center, New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, Macy’s Santaland, Mckittrick Hotel & Insomniac, and Walt Disney World.
Everything Good Studio
Rachel Ciavarella and Jack Kalish
SMALL HADRON COLLIDER
Everything Good Studio is a collaboration between Rachel Ciavarella and Jack Kalish, a multi-disciplinary art and design team based in Brooklyn, NY. Our work is focused on creative and innovative applications of new and emerging technologies. We are interested in the use of art and technology as a means of exploring new ideas through engagement and immersion. We believe art is completed by its audience and should be participatory by design. Through our work we invite the audience to question their preconceived notions of reality and see the world with child-like openness and imagination.
Will Schymik
ASTRAL GATE
Will Schymik is a Philadelphia-based artist who merges digital fabrication, embedded electronics, and generative art to create immersive, interactive experiences. Drawing on his background in software engineering, he programs controllers and visual systems that bring his art to life. As a legally blind artist, he leans into the irony of working in visual media. Rather than a limitation, it has guided him toward digital fabrication, a medium that gives his ideas both structure and precision.
Uriel Guy
ECLIPSED LUMINOSITY
Uriel Guy is an Israeli-born, New York–based artist whose work with LEDs spans from intimate wearables to a 50-foot mobile art pieces. Featured at Burning Man, NYC galleries, and private events, he has spent over a decade exploring geometric forms in light. Drawing on his engineering background, Uriel creates large-scale, immersive works driven by a deep internal need for expression. While working with advanced technology, he preserves the innocence of color and movement, inviting curiosity, play, and interaction.
RedShadow
FLOATING JELLY
Born in China, RedShadow grew up in an environment where art felt distant and inaccessible. With no formal training, she pursued a career in science and engineering, but her instinct to create never faded. From building furniture, making digital gadgets to pottery, her hands were always busy making.
A few years ago, she turned toward art, self-taught and guided by curiosity. Her work is deeply inspired by nature—particularly the ocean life she’s encountered while diving. The rhythm of the sea and the elegance of marine creatures have become central themes in her sculptural explorations.
In 2023, she co-created Magic Jelly, a large-scale inflatable installation for Burning Man. Floating Jelly, her latest piece, is a continuation of the exploration—a kinetic sculpture powered by wind, echoing the motion and fragility of jellyfish, and inviting viewers to connect with nature’s grace and impermanence.
Glimmer Labs
Gisbel Videla, Nathan Carter,
Matthew Myers, and Dean Galvin
THE SENSORIUM
Glimmer Labs is an interdisciplinary light and experiential design studio founded by Gisbel Videla, Nathan Carter, Matthew Myers, and Dean Galvin. United by a belief that light can spark both wonder and comfort, the team blends architecture, fabrication, software, and storytelling into immersive environments. Gisbel brings a decade of lighting design expertise shaped at Parsons; Nathan, a master fabricator and educator, ensures craft and precision; Dean programs responsive LED systems through TouchDesigner; and Matt merges building, play, and cultural entrepreneurship. Together they create installations like The SENSORIUM—a living oasis of light, sound, and human connection.
Todd Polenberg
WAVE GARDEN
Todd Polenberg is an award-winning artist, engineer, and electronic musician who works with light and sound to create sublime otherworldly experiences. His interactive light art aims to be simultaneously playful, contemplative, and psychedelic. He co-founded and currently performs at Pataphysics, a bimonthly experimental audiovisual concert series. His work has been shown at Ars Electronica, Science Gallery Dublin, Mysteryland, Burning Man and featured in Forbes and Forward magazines.
Jasper Toeli
BE THE TREE
Jasper Toeli is on mission to make you experience nature's hidden systems. By doing so the users of his (light) artworks realize that they are also part of the wild world and walk away with a new found respect for the natural world. He visualizes the mushroom roots that connect all the trees in a forest and provides them with nutrients and even communication. His Wood Wide Web fills the forest with fluorescent lines that glow vibrantly under black light and uses laser projection mapping to so the flow of data. Or his Be the Tree that sheds light upon the symbiotic shared breath between humans and plants by projecting users faces onto blooming trees.
Experience Lab
INFINITE MOON
Experience Lab is an Experiential studio based in NYC focusing on Place making, immersive installations and experiential design.
Darrell Thorne
PERFORMANCE ART
Darrell is a force of creativity and connection. The founder and creative director of Darrell Thorne Studios, he discovered his primary loves of costume and transformation, and the joy of hosting gatherings and events at a very young age. A completely autodidactic artist, he honed his unique skill set through 15 years of experimentation and performing in nightclubs and theater, while working full time as a hospital administrator.
With the launch of Darrell Thorne Studios a decade ago, he realized a life long dream of creating art combined with performance and connecting with people, while uplifting parties and events.
Flow Juggling
PERFORMANCE ART
Flow Juggle is your source for the extraordinary, the best juggling forward fire and LED props in one place in Brooklyn, New York, steps from the Brooklyn and the Manhattan Bridge.