Carol Mullins, a prolific lighting designer for dance and theater in New York City and around the world, who spent more than 40 years working for Danspace Project in the East Village, died on March 24. She was 86.
Jessie Dunn-Gilbert, a friend, confirmed her death, of heart failure, at a hospital in Manhattan.
Ms. Mullins got into lighting design through avant-garde performance. She was working in family planning in Thailand in 1970 when she received a letter from a friend living in New York.
“She was saying things like, ‘I bounced on a board for five hours in an alley and it was the most meaningful experience of my life,’” Ms. Mullins told The New York Times in 2024. “I thought she was in some cult, and I had to get her out.”
That “cult” turned out to be the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, an artistic collective run by the playwright and director Robert Wilson. Instead of rescuing her friend, Ms. Mullins joined up, too, and began performing in Mr. Wilson’s poetic, time-intensive productions. In the dialogue-free, seven-hour “Deafman Glance,” she played a giant bunny.
“That was my tribe,” Ms. Mullins said in an interview. Another member of the collective was the experimental playwright Jim Neu, who became her romantic partner for the next 40 years.
Before a performance in Spoleto, Italy, in the early 1970s, Mr. Wilson asked Ms. Mullins to take over the lighting design. “I knew nothing about lighting,” she said in 2024, “but Bob had an intuitive feel for what people would be good at.”
She continued performing as well, but when Mr. Wilson began creating “Einstein on the Beach,” his landmark 1976 opera with Philip Glass, he took back control of the lighting design and wouldn’t cast Ms. Mullins because she couldn’t sing.
“He said, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and he looked like he was going to cry,” she said. “I was definitely crying.”
Moving on, she continued developing her craft as a lighting designer, often working in lofts and other unconventional spaces. For a while, she designed lighting for the choreographer Andy de Groat, who had broken off from Mr. Wilson’s group to form his own company.
In 1982, Mr. de Groat disbanded his troupe. The next day, Ms. Mullins got a call from Cynthia Hedstrom, who was then the director of Danspace Project, offering her a position as the organization’s resident lighting designer. It was a job that Ms. Mullins would keep until her death.
Since 1974, with the exception of a few years after a fire in 1978, Danspace has staged performances at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, the second-oldest church building in Manhattan. Ms. Mullins knew the sanctuary better than most — both its limitations (among them, the lack of a lighting grid and the need to remove equipment before church services) and its possibilities. She said in 2024 that she loved the white space, the beauty of the columns and the height of the arched nave, “the spires pointing up to God and all of that.”
She saw her job as being of service to others, especially choreographers and dancers. “It’s a temptation to impose myself,” she said, “but I try to keep a grip on it. I’m pretty good at finding out what it is that artists are trying to accomplish and figuring out how to do that.”
This was a skill that the artists appreciated. “She takes delight in your work and can look at it and pick up things you might not notice,” Vicky Shick, a choreographer who worked with Ms. Mullins many times, told The Times in 2024.
Ms. Shick called Ms. Mullins’ designs “a subtle dazzle as opposed to a big show-off.”
Lorraine Carol Mullins was born on May 5, 1939, in St. Paul, Minn. During World War II, her family moved nearby Washington, D.C., where her father, George Mullins, worked at the Department of Defense and the Office of Management and Budget. Her mother, Jessie (Higinbotham) Mullins, worked as an administrator at the George Washington University.
Carol spent much of her childhood in Lorton, Va., a community she did not remember fondly. “It was the home of three prisons,” she told The Times in 2024. “The motto of the town was ‘Not Just a Place to Do Time.’”
She studied chemistry at the George Washington University without graduating, though she later took courses to earn her bachelor’s degree. For a while, she worked for a technical publisher in Alabama; when the company relocated to New York around the late 1960s, she did, too. Apart from a few years in Thailand, New York was Ms. Mullins’s home from then on.
In addition to her position at Danspace Project — which she shared with Kathy Kaufmann starting in 1998 — Ms. Mullins designed lighting at the Joyce Theater, the Kitchen and the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, and at theaters in France, Russia, Finland and Brazil. She collaborated with the theater directors Anne Bogart and Andrei Serban, as well as countless choreographers, including Steve Paxton, Yoshiko Chuma, Ishmael Houston-Jones and Douglas Dunn.
She won three New York Dance and Performance Awards, known as Bessies, and one Obie Award. She was honored in 2024 at Danspace’s 50th-anniversary gala.
In 1998, Ms. Mullins married Mr. Neu, the playwright. He died in 2010. She has no immediate survivors.
When Ms. Mullins was around 50, she visited her mother in Virginia and had an uncomfortable realization: She was making less money than the teenager cutting her mother’s lawn.
She made the decision to quit Danspace, and enrolled in business classes at Baruch College. But by the time the next show came up, she dropped the idea.
“I was making enough to get by,” she said. She never again considering quitting.
Later in life, when asked why she kept at lighting design, she explained that she enjoyed solving a whole new set of problems every couple of weeks.
“And I love dancers and the choices they make,” she added. “I think it’s wonderful.”
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