Dennis Parren

Designer Dennis Parren was born in Osnabrück, Germany in 1976. He studied illustration and graphic design at De Montfort University in the United Kingdom, graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in 1999. He went on to study in the “Man and Living” program at the Design Academy Eindhoven, earning a second Bachelor’s degree in 2011. While still a student, in 2010, Parren interned at Studio Bertjan Pot in Schiedam, the Netherlands.

Parren established his eponymous studio in 2012 in Eindhoven. His experimental product designs incorporate technology and a playful attitude towards traditional lighting. Notable projects to date include Parren’s CMYK lamp series, which employs primary colored LED bulbs that, when combined, generate white light. When one of these hues is blocked, however—by the lamp’s own sculptural form, for example—the other colors join forces to produce cyan, magenta, and yellow colored shadows. Originally designed as his graduation project in 2011, CMYK was honored with the Dutch Design Award (in the Free Design category) and won the [D3] Contest, ran by the German Design Council, in Cologne in 2012.

Parren’s work has been shown in respected institutions such as Milan’s Galleria Rossana Orlandi and the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany.