The field of protein design and engineering has seen significant growth in recent years due to the advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). The design of proteins that are light-responsive or light-emitting has its unique challenges due to the need to tune excited-state properties in proteins, which benefit from advanced spectroscopic methods and emerging computational methods such as recent quantum mechanical excited-state simulation methods and AI. This workshop aims to bring together three communities that do not interact often in one setting, which include computational chemists (especially those specialized in quantum mechanical and multiscale simulations of proteins), protein engineers, and experimental physical chemists, to address the unique challenges in designing light-responsive and light-emitting proteins. Although fruitful collaboration already exists in some subsets of these communities (e.g., focused on opsins or green-fluorescent proteins), we aim to span a much wider range of systems including, for example, chlorophyll- and bilin-based complexes and less-studied photoenzymes. Bringing together this broad community of researchers in a wide variety of light-responsive systems has great potential to accelerate progress in this important research area by combining new data-driven and multiscale simulation methods with high-throughput protein engineering and spectroscopic experiments.