UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Noted Broadway costume designer and Penn State alumna Carrie Robbins will give a public talk at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 1, in 16 Borland Building on the University Park campus.
Robbins, a Penn State Distinguished Alumna, has created costumes for more than 30 Broadway shows, numerous operas, dozens of regional and touring productions, and the wait staffs at the Rainbow Room and Windows on the World. She also designed the cast’s attire for the 1985–86 season of “Saturday Night Live.”
After graduating from Penn State, Robbins went to Yale to pursue a master’s in set design, but ultimately earned a degree in costume design. Her first job after graduate school was designing the costumes for Broadway’s “Grease” on a shoestring budget — money was so tight that the pink poodle on Sandy’s skirt was snipped from the bathmat in Robbins’ apartment. She earned a Drama Desk Award for her costume designs and one of the musical’s seven Tony nominations.
Two years later she earned a second Tony nomination for her work on “Over Here!” and began a second career as an instructor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she is now a master teacher of costume design.
Among the shows she has designed are “The Threepenny Opera,” “White Christmas,” “Agnes of God,” “Frankenstein,” “Yentl” and “Death in Venice.”
Robbins is the recipient of numerous honors, including the 2012 Irene Sharaff Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the Theatre Development Fund. The monograph “The Designs of Carrie Robbins,” by Annie O. Cleveland and M. Barrett Cleveland and part of a United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT) series documenting the work of America’s best theatrical designers, was published in 2011.
For more on Carrie Robbins, visit http://carrierobbinsdesignageinc.com.