Design Statement

The Zombie Joe’s Underground alternative theater company in Los Angeles has developed a large and devoted cult following for its productions over the past 20+ years. In the summer of 2025, Lena was invited to work as Technical Director and sound and lighting designer on one of these shows, "Roots of Darkness," an original horror piece with some seriously dark and disturbing themes and plot twists. Working closely with the play's writer/director, Lena not only created the atmosphere for this show with her designs, but also operated the sound and lighting board on all performance nights, hitting one tightly timed cue after another. Though the black box theater space and its equipment were different from what Lena was used to working on in Burbank High School's thousand-seat auditorium, her strong understanding of color shifts and dimming effects allowed her to design a show that left audience members both scared and entertained. (Unfortunately for our purposes, it's part of the ZJU ethos and mystique to not allow production photos so that each production remains a memory only to its live audiences.)