LAURA CROW – COSTUME DESIGNER AND CURATOR

Laura Crow is an internationally known costume designer whose designs have been seen in China, Japan, Micronesia, Yugoslavia, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands and the UK.  In the United States, her designs have been seen on Broadway, Off-Broadway and for most of our prominent Regional Theatres including five years as a resident designer for Connecticut Opera at the Bushnell Theatre.  Among her many awards that reflect over three hundred designs are: the Drama Desk Award, the American Theatre Wing Award, the OBIE Award, the Maharam Award, and the Village Voice Award for New York work; the Joseph Jefferson Award and multiple Joseph Jefferson Award nominations in Chicago; three Drama-Logue Awards, the Backstage Garland Award and the Bay Area Critics Award for work in Los Angeles and San Francisco; the Phoenix Drama Critics Award and four ZONI Awards from Arizona and a Helen Hayes Award nomination in Washington, DC.  Her designs were included in the Lincoln Center Exhibition Curtain Call: Celebrating a Century of Women Designing for Live Performance, focusing on 100 women designers from the past 100 years in the United States, and were included in Costume Design at the Turn of the Century:1990 – 2015 celebrating the work of over 300 designers from around the world.  Produced by Igor Roussanoff and Dimitry Rodionov, it opened at the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum in Moscow in 2015 it has toured to the USA, China, Taiwan and Poland and is now headed to Chile.  Laura’s designs have been chosen five times to be part of the United States pavilion at the Prague Quadrennial that hosts over 60 countries from around the world every four years and she has been selected to be part of the World Stage Design Exhibition in Toronto 2005, Seoul 2009, Cardiff 2013 and Taiwan in 2017.

Some of the highlights of Laura Crow’s Broadway career include the productions of Burn This, starring John Malkovich and Joan Allen, Fifth of July, starring Christopher Reeve and Swoozie Kurtz, Redwood Curtain, starring Jeff Daniels and Debra Monk, Sweet Bird of Youth, starring Irene Worth and Christopher Walken, The Water Engine, starring Patti LuPone, and The Seagull, starring Tyne Daly and John Voight.  Linda Lavin wore Laura’s costumes in Cakewalk, about the life of author Lillian Hellman.  As the resident costume designer for 13 years at the Circle Repertory Theatre in New York City, Laura, along with scenic designer John Lee Beatty and lighting designer Dennis Parichy, created a visual style for the Poetic Realism movement in contemporary American theatre.  This was the movement that flowered around the work of playwright Lanford Wilson and director Marshall W. Mason in the 1970s and 1980s. 

Laura Crow, now Professor Emerita, was a professor of costume history, design and technology and continues to work hard for the inclusion of international students in the graduate costume design program at the University of Connecticut where she was head of design until she retired in 2017.  She has pioneered student exchanges for American students, both graduate and undergraduate to other countries and has encouraged exchange programs in other institutions around the world.  She is a firm believer in promoting peace and understanding by uniting people through cultural exchanges and live performances. The University awarded her an Excellence in Teaching Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award, prior to her retirement.

In 2002, Professor Crow won a Fulbright Grant to the Philippines as a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar.  She studied the multi-cultural aspects of the costumes created for festivals in the Philippines, a cultural crossroad between ancient traditions and the modern, between east and west, and between the Christian and Muslim worlds.  This information is documented with over 5000 photographs and is being edited and compiled into a book titled A Philippines Festival Journey.  She has continued to spend time researching festival, fantasy and carnival costumes in Cuba, Trinidad, New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro, and has authored two chapters for Masquerade: A Panorama that was published in the spring of 2015. 

In 1997, Laura Crow was appointed one of the United States representatives to the international organization of designers, OISTAT, headquartered in the Netherlands.  The mission of this organization was originally to share western design and technology with those designers isolated behind the iron curtain.  With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, OISTAT expanded their mission to include all third world countries, and the headquarters has moved to Taiwan under the support of that government. Laura was nominated and elected to head the Costume Design Group for OISTAT and served for ten years.  She was also elected a Fellow of the Institute for the United States Institute of Theatre Technology – USITT – the United States branch of  OISTAT.

With her background and interest in cultural history, Professor Crow has shifted from costume design for the theatre into the curation of costumes for exhibitions. As a result of her training as a costume historian at the Courtauld Institute at the University of London, she views the curation of museum exhibitions as a way to personalize history. When viewers are able to come close to the actual garments worn they are better able to visualize and empathize with those who wore them. Crow’s curatorial work includes the exhibition Women of New England: Dress from the Industrial Age 1850-1900 that was displayed at the Benton Museum of Art and then multiple locations in Connecticut from 2012 – 2014 with over 13,000 people attending.  Beatrice Fox Auerbach: The Woman, Her World and Her Wardrobe about the CEO and owner of G. Fox department store in Hartford was also shown at multiple locations in Connecticut with the final showing in the winter and spring of 2016 at the Connecticut Historical Society where they had a record number of visitors. Other recent exhibitions include Princess for a Day: Wedding Gowns from 1860 – 1960 at the Dodd Center on the UCONN Campus, Breaking the Glass: The American Jewish Wedding in collaboration with the Mandell Jewish Community Center in West Hartford, The Eccentrics: The Evolution of the Eighties, at the Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts gallery on the UCONN campus, The Timeless Art of Dyllis: Forty Years of Creative Clothing a collaboration between Professor Crow and the Windham Textile and History Museum and moved on to the Woodstock Historical Society Museum.  Opening in June of 2018, she curated a comprehensive exhibition of clothing worn in Northeastern Connecticut with special emphasis on the millinery created by the local women who worked professionally in this field. Female Finery: Clothing and Hats from Early New England.      It was extended through December of 2018 and was acknowledged with a 2019 CLHO Award of Merit.  Her most recent exhibition was for the Mansfield Historical Society and focused on textile creation in New England from colonial times up until the Industrial Revolution, From Fiber to Fashion. The sequel will focus on the Cheney Mills in Manchester as the silk industry expanded in New England.  Recently she was one of three American curators for Innovative Costume of the XXI Century: The Next Generation that once again began in Moscow and had over 30 countries participating. 

Prior to this exhibition Laura curated The Corset as Art: Past and Present at the new Southern Utah Museum of Art (SUMA) part of the Utah Shakespeare Festival Complex.  Executive Producer Frank Mack and Artistic Director Brian Vaughn inspired by the productions of Intimate Apparel and Ragtime in the Festival’s 2021 reopening season sought to have an exhibit featuring 19th century corsets.   Museum director Jessica Kinsey was in full support and the SUMA’s 8000 square foot gallery exhibition grew to over forty corsets on mannequins following the evolution of corsets through the 19th century and into the modern era where it transformed into tight lacing, burlesque, high fashion and into an art form in itself.  That led to the current exhibition The Big Squeeze: The Corset as Art glorifying the many conceptual artists, craft artisans, ingenious designers and photographers who have taken corsetry to another level.