Chillon Thomason is a born and bred Cajun. (She’s a Latiolais, after all.) Growing up, she was immersed in a swamp lifestyle and listened carefully to her paternal grandparents who only spoke Cajun French. Early morning fishing trips in the swamp were common, along with dinners of boiled crawfish and gumbo. Chillon credits one of her uncles with her “artist bug” – his only two loves were the outdoors and drawing.

After her graduation from Carencro High School, just north of Lafayette, Chillon moved to Atlanta, GA in search of a degree that would help propel her into the world of media and satisfy her affinity for rapidly developing technology, while allowing the artist within to emerge. So after doing tons of freelance commercial work and unpaid stints producing and directing independent films, Chillon turned her focus to the small screen. She acquired a position at Crawford Communications, a highly respected broadcast and network uplink facility in Atlanta, where she was offered a chance to manage one of Crawford’s biggest clients, Discovery Communications. In a nutshell, if you were at home watching The Discovery Channel or The Learning Channel sometime between 1999 and 2003 and your screen went black, Chillon was one of the people running around, trying to get your programming back on the air. Upon her return to Lafayette, Chillon produced for KATC TV-3 and was project manager for the station’s Tools for Schools campaign.

During her time in Atlanta, Chillon met her husband Ken. The story of how they met on a fishing pier along the Gulf Coast is a story she says she will tell in a movie one day. Chillon and Ken returned to Lafayette in 2004 in time for the birth of their first son. Ethan is now 4, and his little brother, Xander, came 18 months later. Her spare time is spent enjoying the wild, unpredictable shenanigans of her boys, cooking and baking, painting, watching movies or listening to albums (yes, vinyl), and talking politics or new age philosophies.

As LITE’s media and integration specialist, Chillon ensures LITE’s visualization venues are ready to roll at a moment’s notice. You will often find her traversing quickly through LITE’s corridors, tackling her long list of requests for assistance on projects and constantly organizing and updating LITE’s highly specialized equipment and venues.