Her parents had moved there from the north of England; her mother worked for Amnesty International Ireland and her father was a professor at Trinity College.
She worked as a light board operator on an undergraduate production of a Caryl Churchill play, an experience she found to be "like music, only in a visual medium.
[3] After relocating to the United States, Cox worked odd jobs, including as a theater electrician at Hartford Stage, before pursuing graduate studies at New York University Tisch School of the Arts.
She has an extensive list of Broadway credits, including Macbeth (2022), which starred Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga, and the musical adaptation of Amélie.
[1] Her major collaborators include the directors Sam Gold and John Doyle, the choreographer Monica Bill Barnes.
Cox has cited painters William John Leech and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as major influences on her use of color, as well as the work of light and space artist James Turrell.
[9] In 2022's Broadway production of Macbeth, Cox and director Sam Gold drew creative inspiration from a comparison between theater craft and witchcraft.
They chose a heavily saturated color palette influenced by horror films, feminist artists like Judy Chicago, and the band Pussy Riot's punk-activist spectacles.
In the production, the actors operated custom-built portable fog machines and handheld lighting instruments to shape the atmosphere onstage.
[20] The event was partly inspired by a class that Cox had co-taught at Princeton with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, focused on race and lighting design.