Named in memory of Tony Gottelier, the renowned industry innovator and commentator who passed away in 2006, the annual Gottelier Award aims to recognise those product developers who have made significant long-term contributions to the advancement of entertainment, presentation or installation technology - whether in audio, lighting, rigging, staging, or any other related field.
The competition was tough, with this year's nominees being Chris Cronin, founder of Total Solutions Group (TSG), Artistic Licence founder Wayne Howell, Dr Christian Heil founder of L-Acoustics, Masaaki 'Mick' Okabayashi, head of Yamaha's digital mixing console development team, Yvan Péard, co-founder of Ayrton, The Strand Lighting R&D team, 1960s-1980s, led by Marin Moore and later by David Bertenshaw and winner Anne Valentino.
Anne has spent most of her working life contributing to the creation of lighting control consoles. Starting as a technical director at a Houston performing arts centre, she worked for lighting manufacturer Kliegl before moving on to Strand Lighting. Here she began her work with lighting control products which would define the industry, from later versions of the Strand Light Palette, through ETC's Obsession and Expression consoles, to Vari-Lite's iconic Virtuoso and back again to ETC where she developed the Eos, Ion and Gio consoles.
"I was deeply honoured by this. Tony Gottelier was one of my favourite people in the industry and being associated with his name was really touching," Anne commented. "The thing about product development is that there's always a forward facing person who gets a lot of the credit.
"I've been so lucky with every single project I've worked on to have really fantastic colleagues who were collaborators and really helped shaped the products. On Obsession it was Jon Ide, Michael Snyder on Virtuoso at Vari-Lite and on the Eos family of products, Dennis Varin and Matt Halberstadt and our developers Dan Duffy, Chris Mizerak, Alice Kahn, Ray Hill, Andrew Daniel. They're the people who actually do the work. It's always a big team of people that make these things happen, so I'm honoured for all of us."
(LSi Online)
