James “Jim” Lawton Nuckolls was a lighting designer and professor at Parsons School of Design at The New School.

James Lawton Nuckolls was born in San Francisco in 1938, to James Nuckolls (née James Nuckolls Brown) and Gladys Leach Nuckolls (née Wilson). He grew up in the neighborhood of Parnassus Heights, where his father worked as a professor of dentistry at the University of California, San Francisco. His father died in 1952. In 1963, Gladys married the sailboat builder, Myron Spaulding.

Nuckolls received a bachelor of arts in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master of fine arts in theater from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1964. He then moved to New York City to work as a theater lighting designer before shifting the focus of his work to architectural lighting design.

Nuckolls was first hired by Parsons in 1970 as a faculty member in Environmental Design. In 1981, he co-founded the Lighting Institute at The New School, where he served as director, and in 1984 established the world’s first MFA program in lighting design.

In 1971, Nuckolls was one of the founding members of the International Association of Lighting Designers. In 1976, Nuckolls published Interior Lighting for Environmental Designers, an influential textbook on lighting design. A second edition was published in 1983.

Nuckolls died from complications related to AIDS in 1987. In 1988, the Nuckolls Fund for Lighting Education, an endowment fund for university-level lighting education programs, was established in his honor.

Sources

James Nuckolls press clippings, 1964-1984, 2016.KA.03, Box k_15, Folder 14 and Box k_17, Folders 8-10. The New School Archives and Special Collections.

New School for Social Research Annual Report 1985. New School Annual Reports, NS.01.01.08, Box 1, Folder 2. The New School Archives and Special Collections. https://digital.archives.newschool.edu/index.php/Detail/objects/NS010108_000002