Steven Rosen, FIALD, CLD, founder and CEO of the lighting design practice Available Light, has announced his retirement, the firm said. Rosen leaves after a lighting design career spanning more than 40 years, having built a company that today operates six studios with almost 40 people.
His route into lighting design began with a different ambition. Rosen started with a plan to spend a life designing for the theater, and nothing, he has said, brought him greater joy than interpreting a dramatic work with light. That plan expanded as opportunities appeared. He supplemented his theatrical work by lighting tradeshow exhibits alongside one of his mentors, Rick Chamberlain. A chance tradeshow collaboration with museum exhibit designer Nick Paffett led to his first museum commission, the Virginia Air & Space Center. A few years later, a fortuitous encounter with architect Bob Schaeffner produced his first architectural lighting design assignment, a new earth sciences building at Amherst College.
Rosen framed the sequence of theater, tradeshows, museums and architecture as a choice rather than a drift, asking why he should focus on one discipline when he could pursue all of them. He built Available Light on the belief that unrestrained theatrical storytelling could serve a wider audience.
The practice was founded in 1992, beginning as a single drafting table in Rosen's living room apartment. It has since grown into a national lighting design practice whose portfolio spans museum exhibition, architecture, themed entertainment, trade show exhibits and immersive environments around the world. Rosen's wife, Susan Gochenour, believed in the vision and signed on early as the young firm's first managing director.
Career recognition
- The first-ever IALD Radiance Award, for Available Light's work on Building 7 at MIT
- Lifetime Achievement awards from both LDI/Live Design and The Edison Report
- Fellow of the IALD
- Named to the 2025 blooloop 50 Top Museum Influencer list
Handing over the reins
In announcing his departure, Rosen credited the team he assembled. He said his greatest achievement has been bringing together Available Light's passionate, talented and hard-working professionals, and that serving as their leader has been an honor and a privilege. Recognizing that the firm has multiple layers of people ready for the challenge of running it, he decided that the time had come to hand over the reins and cheer on their success, describing himself as a very proud founder.
Available Light said the company Rosen built will continue to evolve, push boundaries and create meaningful experiences through light. Since 1992, the firm describes its work as crafting compelling, innovative, sustainable and insightful lighting design solutions for a diverse range of project types, including museum experiences, contemporary architecture, themed entertainment attractions and trade show exhibits.