Kerro Knox 3

Professor of Theatre
Associate Director, School of Music, Theatre and Dance

Contact: [email protected]
(248) 370-3025

Kerro Knox 3 (Professor) teaches lighting design and theatre history, as well as serving as the Associate Director of the School of Music, Theatre and Dance.   

He has designed countless shows in all areas of music, theatre and dance at Oakland, most recently: lighting for Macbeth, The Who’s Tommy, and Blue Stockings, costumes for Lysistrata Remix, and scenery and lighting for the operas Street Scene and Dialogues of the Carmelites.  He also has directed several productions, most notably children’s theatre shows he has developed: Just So Stories, co-adapted from Rudyard Kipling’s book, Serengeti Tales and Anansi, both adapted from African folklore. He also directed the one-man musical Herringbone at the Body Politic Theatre in Chicago and in Los Angeles. For several summers, he has traveled to Greece to teach, design, and perform.

Kerro designs lighting regularly for the dance companies Eisenhower Dance Detroit, Take Root, and Patterson Rhythm Pace; which have taken him to New York City, Poland and South Korea.  His work for Meadow Brook Theatre includes Mary Jane and Arsenic and Old Lace.  He has also designed lighting for Stephanie Skura Dance at The Joyce Theatre and Lincoln Center in New York and at SUNY Buffalo. His scenic designs have been at Michigan State University and The Chapin School in New York. 

Kerro is also assistant director of Oakland’s African Drum and Xylophone Ensemble and the Steel Band. He has played the music in OU’s productions of Les Blancs and Death and the King’s Horseman.  He also plays professionally in both genres, which has taken him to New York City, Canada, Ghana, and Trinidad, as well as performing with local musical groups including the Warren Symphony Orchestra.  Their CD of Christmas tunes on steel pan includes his arrangement of selections from The Nutcracker Suite. He also tunes and builds musical instruments for the ensembles. 

Kerro has worked at the Cleveland Play House, Syracuse Stage, Yale Repertory Theatre, Geva Theatre Center (Rochester, NY), and on the national tour of The Phantom of the Opera.  He is a member of the Actors’ Equity Association as a stage manager and received his BA in American Studies from Yale College and his MFA in Technical Design and Production from the Yale School of Drama, where he studied with world-renowned designers Jennifer Tipton and Ming Cho Lee. 

Prior to teaching at Oakland, he taught at Syracuse University and at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas.  He is former Co-Chair of Region III for the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival.