Spotlight on Diversity August 2025
August 2025
Nubi Leon Martinez Illuminates Culture Through Design
Nubi Leon Martinez
Project Director, Arquifabrica
At 13, Nubi Leon Martinez experienced her first rock concert in Venezuela. She remembers vividly the moods created by the lighting, but not the band. “I was impressed,” she recalled. “The lighting created atmosphere – it changed how I felt. I knew then, I wanted to work on something like that when I grow up.”
While pursuing her architecture degree in Caracas, she worked evenings as a technician for concerts and theater performances, learning hands-on how light interacts with space and emotion. Today, with more than 20 years in the field, she is an accomplished lighting designer based in Madrid. Having worked across three continents, Leon continues to merge design with academic research and cultural storytelling.
Leon’s first professional role was as a museographer at Venezuela’s Museum of Science, where she designed exhibitions. “We had to make it attractive to kids and teenagers,” she said, “so I designed some exhibits like a discotheque, using changes in color and lighting to create excitement.” At the same time, she was learning the delicate balance of exhibit lighting: preserving fragile objects while making them visible and compelling. “I explored how light defines a space, how it tells a story, and how it can care for or damage what it touches.”
Her pursuit of deeper knowledge brought her to Spain in 2007, where she completed a master’s degree in lighting design. From there, she accepted a job in Dubai at the height of the city’s development boom. “Dubai didn’t have the Metro [transit system] yet; no Dubai Mall; no Burj Khalifa [skyscaper]. It was a city under construction,” she explained. “We worked on everything: offices, schools, residential buildings, retail spaces.” The scale and pace were astounding.
An immersive experience
Eclectic Barcelona brought more exploration through museum projects and a second master’s in project coordination from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. That period also broadened Leon’s understanding of light across cultures.
“I’m from the Caribbean. Our light is sparkling, vibrant,” she said. “And in the Middle East, light is celebratory: people decorate their homes and streets with chains of lights for weddings or religious holidays. It’s joyful, expressive, and public. In Europe, it’s different. Lighting is very regulated – restrained. But it’s also part of the collective memory.”
For example, one Art Deco heritage building in Madrid still glows with decades-old neon tubes. “They could use LED, but they don’t. They keep the original lights as part of the city’s identity. At night, lighting shows off the city – its stories, its nostalgia.”
This cultural perspective informs all her work. “When I live somewhere, I try to become part of the culture,” she said. “To understand what light means to people. What emotions it carries for them. Then I can contribute as a designer – not by imposing something new, but by adding to what is already there.”
Her design process begins with deep respect for the space and its users. “From that base, I bring in my own ideas. Sometimes I take risks (atrevido) but only when it’s appropriate. I aim to make people feel something. To live an emotion.”
Now completing a PhD that broadly explores lighting’s influence, she speaks animatedly about the nonvisual effects of light. “Lighting doesn’t just enter through the eyes, it enters through the skin. It influences our brain, our nervous system, our mood, our hormones. There are neuroendocrine and neurobehavioral responses. That’s why we must use light with balance; no excess, no glare. Not just for energy savings, but for health, for animals, for ecosystems.”
Back in the Americas
Traveling to the US, Leon shared these insights as a featured speaker at LightFair in 2021, 2023, and 2025. “It’s an amazing platform,” she said. “So many people in lighting, from all over the world come together to learn and share.”
While most of her project work is in Spain and the Middle East, Leon has contributed to US-based cultural centers through her work with experience design firm ACCIONA Cultura: Museum of the Alamo in San Antonio, TX; the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, OH; and the Carolina Museum of the Marine in Jacksonville, NC. She also writes regularly for Entre Rayas, a Venezuelan magazine focused on architecture. “My goal is to help architects understand what lighting can do,” she explained. “We speak different languages, but we need to work together.” Proof that great lighting speaks many languages.
Though she lives across the Atlantic, Leon became a member of the IESNYC Section in 2019, while visiting New York. “That’s the city I feel most familiar with in the US,” she said. She stays connected to the NYC lighting community through education, writing, and occasional travel. “I try to attend the webinars whenever I can. They’re excellent – so much valuable information. And the newsletter: I always learn something from it.”
For now, she remains busy in Madrid, balancing her studies, architectural work, and cultural contributions. “I’m not planning to move to the States,” she mused, “but if my work is needed there, I’ll go. I’m open.” Her dream destination? “I would love to work in Bali. To live on the beach and design something beautiful...”
