Addressing the Character and Dressing a Narrative: A Design Portfolio

The role of a designer in a theatrical production influences the audience’s understanding of time, place, character, and mood. A costume designer uses costumes to express a character’s personality, emotions, socioeconomic status, and other traits that define who that character is. A media designer can influence the mood, sense of time and reality, and place. Both of these design roles have an impact in how a theatrical story is told, what an audience understands visually, and has the power to create magic on the stage. As the story grows and transforms, the costume and media of a production must also follow this path–aging, maturing, regressing, swelling, shrinking, ebbing. The utilization of these elements and principals by the designer allow an audience to fall deep within the world of a play and find out why that particular story is being told and what is the meaning within that story. Inspiration for both costume and media designers can come from paintings, photographs, sculpture, the colors and textures in nature, and even writing. A designer understands how even the small details put on stage impacts the audience’s understanding of the play.

This thesis portfolio contains images and descriptions of my designs at the University of Iowa. It includes both realized productions and class work to show the growth in my design work and my process over the course of my training for my Master of Fine Arts.

The entire breadth of my thesis portfolio can be found at the link:

https://ir.uiowa.edu/theatre_d_folio/