Dennis Parichy
American lighting designer

Dennis Parichy is an American lighting designer. He won the 1980 Drama Desk Award for Talley's Folly and the Obie Award in 1981.
Career
Parichy has designed lighting for 25 Broadway productions since 1976, including: The Price, The Tenth Man, Coastal Disturbances, Penn & Teller, Burn This, The Nerd, As Is, Angels Fall, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Duet for One, Crimes of the Heart, The Water Engine, and Knock Knock.
He has designed for Off-Broadway and regional theatres as well. His first Off-Broadway show was Little Eyolf at the Actors Playhouse in 1964; he was the lighting designer for the Lanford Wilson plays Ludlow Fair at Caffe Cino in 1965 and Book of Days in a Signature Theatre Company production in November 2002.
Parichy has been nominated three times for a Tony Award, for his work on Redwood Curtain (1993), Fifth of July (1981), and Talley's Folly (1980), for which he won a 1980 Drama Desk Award.
He was the resident lighting designer for Circle Repertory Company where he worked with director Marshall W. Mason on the first productions of plays by many American playwrights. He lit many productions for the Manhattan Theatre Club, such as The Miss Firecracker Contest (1984), Bloody Poetry (1987) and Aristocrats (1989).
He has had a long working relationship with Athol Fugard. He designed the lighting for Fugard's Scenes from Soweto (Manhattan Theatre Club, 1978), Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act (Manhattan Theatre Club, 1978), Boesman and Lena (Off-Broadway, 1992), Playland (1993) (Manhattan Theatre Club), and My Children!
“Dennis Parichy” enters the record as american lighting designer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Dennis, Parichy and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Dennis Parichy” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Dennis, Parichy and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5258841. VIAF identifies the subject as 78849170. The Library of Congress control number is n2009008961. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1980, 1981, 1976 and 1964.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dennis Parichy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.