Hannah Kerman entered Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts with the same dream as many: she wanted to be an actor. As a young teenager in 2013, nothing seemed impossible. But quickly, and humbly, she changed course.
“It was kind of a wake up call when I wasn’t getting cast in stuff,” she says. “Maybe I’m not good at this.”
Kerman switched her schedule to start taking classes on production instead, falling in love with programming and designing the lights for stage performances.
“I really like the combination that lighting offers with technology along with creativity,” she says. “What could I do with lights in a way that an actor can change up a role, but still stick to the script? Everyone is still following the storyline, but there’s different ways of being creative around it.”
She went to college at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. There, she began interning for a Los Angeles-based company that produces lighting for network television. After graduating in 2021, she moved there to work for the company full time.
“It was a really great opportunity, and it all happened because I sent an email,” she says.
Her background was in theatre, but the onset of TV cameras birthed an entirely new obstacle.
“It’s wildly different in so many ways that you wouldn’t even think of,” she says. “There’s just so many more people that work on a TV production, and so many more people that you have to tell if you’re doing something.”
Despite the stipulations, she grew to fall in love with the accelerated nature of the work.
“The reason I love TV so much is that I’m able to create this work that immediately shows up in people’s houses, as opposed to a theater production that’s a limited quantity,” she says.
Now 25, Kerman has worked on a growing laundry list of high-profile productions, including the Democratic National Convention; the Oscars, Grammys and Emmys; and a couple of the most popular network shows, America’s Got Talent and Dancing With The Stars.
“The first time I called Dancing, I don’t think I ate that entire day,” she says. “I was so nervous that something was going to go wrong and that it was going to be my fault.”
These days, she’s gotten comfortable. But the workload hasn’t slowed down. Sometimes there’s 15-20 separate lighting cues in a short 90 second routine.
“Every hit, every ding, every tempo beat,” she says. “There is a light doing something that matches that.”
This year, Kerman was surprised with two separate Emmy Award nominations for her work on Dancing With The Stars and America’s Got Talent. She took her mother as her date to the ceremony, where she worked behind the scenes just a year earlier.
