Ava Malia (she/her) is a Maui-based lighting design student at Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama. At Carnegie Mellon, she has been involved in productions as an assistant lighting designer, assistant lighting manager, lighting manager, and programmer. She is currently in the process of her first solo design at the University.
Coming from Maui, Hawai’i, she was surrounded by beautiful art pieces that the community she felt the closest with devoted their entire hearts to creating. She can recognize what it means to be a part of a smaller team and is aware of how vital it is to give a production her all. Now that she has worked on a few larger-scale productions at university on the mainland, she understands what it means to be a part of a driven production team, adding to her experience as a theatre maker. She has learned what it means to work with people in every age range, in nonprofit spaces and corporate events, and in different performance genres, including plays, musicals, weddings, hula, parties, and ballet. She has also experienced many working conditions, not only in indoor mainstage and black box theatres late at night but also in more obscure settings, such as an empty field in Haiku and a huge golf course on a sunny day in Makena, a few hundred feet from the beach. She loves experiencing new things and taking on projects outside her comfort zone.
Ava grew up dancing and creating art and eventually fell in love with lighting design for its ability to manipulate human figures with color and shadow. Growing up surrounded by such vibrant colors and light is the largest thing she credits to her ability to think about performance lighting in abstract ways to. She loves lighting contemporary dance and ballet and is also currently shadowing Enclave's lighting designer to learn how to busk for live audiences.
In her free time, Ava enjoys hiking, dancing, running, and traveling to new places.