Festival Employee Recognized as Fellow

Long-time Utah Shakespeare Festival employee Judy Adamson was recently made a Fellow of the United States Institute for Theatre Technology at its conference in St. Louis. Adamson represents the very best in costume technology in the United States today and is committed to practicing what she preaches. This major award acknowledges her achievements.

As a draper at the Utah Shakespeare Festival each summer since 2002, she has worked with designers Bill Black, David Mickelsen, Holly Payne, and Kevin Alberts on Hay Fever, Born Yesterday, Morning’s at Seven, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, HMS Pinafore, Lend Me a Tenor: The Musical, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Private Lives, Pride and Prejudice, Scapin, Anything Goes, and The Cocoanuts. Festival audiences might remember the breathtaking red silk dress she created for Carole Johnson in Hay Fever.

Eight of her students or student’s students will work in the Festival costume department this summer and create costumes for the 2017 season. 

Her work includes a long list of Broadway credits. At Barbara Matera Ltd., she was a costume draper for Broadway shows Hairspray, Aida, Crazy for You, Miss Saigon, Lion King, Jelly’s Last Jam, The Secret Garden, Showboat, Sideshow Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, and others, working with designers Willa Kim, Irene Sharaff, Miles White, Toni Leslie James, Theoni Aldredge, Florence Klotz, Pat Zipprodt, William Ivey Long, Bob Mackie and others.

She has also created costumes for American Ballet Theatre, Elliot Feld and Paul Taylor Companies, as well as concert clothes for the Pointer Sisters and Mick Jagger.

She has been the costume director in the Department of Dramatic Art and head of the costume production program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 1993. At PlayMakers Repertory Company at UNC, she works professionally as a draper and shares her extensive knowledge in the classroom with her students.