Foad Shafighi, MIES, IALD, CLD, is a Senior Lighting Designer and Lighting Design Department Lead at HGA. With an award-winning career that has taken him across three continents, he has developed a deep appreciation for how spaces shape the way people connect and interact. That global perspective is at the heart of everything he does, driving a human-centric approach to lighting design where technology serves people's well-being first.

Foad has always been drawn to the space where creativity meets technology. For him, lighting is never just a technical problem to solve. It is an experience that shapes how people feel, move, and engage with the world around them. That belief guides every project he takes on and every team he works with at HGA.

In recent years, Foad has become one of the lighting industry's most active voices on integrating AI into design practice. He founded LightingAgent.ai, a startup building an AI-native platform that reimagines how lighting designers work, giving professionals tools that make them more effective without taking the creative thinking out of their hands. Foad is also working on launching BuiltForm.ai, a platform where he plans to share his accumulated AI knowledge, workflows, articles, and insights with the broader AEC industry through approachable blog posts and practical guides for professionals curious about bringing AI into their work. As a speaker, Foad has brought his session "Illuminate and Innovate: A Workflow Revolution with AI" to conferences including IALD Enlighten Europe and IALD Enlighten Americas. His talks are hands-on and accessible. He walks audiences through real workflows using tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and Nano Banana, showing designers, interior architects, and architects exactly how to start using these tools in their own work today.