Veteran costume designer Holly Hynes and costume and scenic designer Zack Brown are among this year's recipients of the 2018 TDF/Irence Sharaff Awards.
Hynes will be honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award for her accomplishments in costume design for ballet, and Brown will be awarded the Robert L. B. Tobin Award for Sustained Excellence in Theatrical Design. Travis Halsey will be presented with the TDF/Kitty Leech Young Master Award, and Fritz Masten will receive the TDF/Irene Sharaff Artisan Award.
The ceremony will take place April 20 at the Edison Ballroom. The presentation will also include a memorial tribute to designing icon Karinska, including a short retrospective film by Suzy Benzigner.
Hynes has designed more than 250 ballets during her career. She is the former Director of Costumes for the New York City Ballet, where she presided for 21 years.
Brown has worked across Broadway, opera, ballet, and television on over 150 productions. Some of his most notable works include The Importance of Being Earnest in 1977, for which he earned a Tony nomination, as well as his creations for the Washington Opera.
Halsey has been designing for ballet, opera, theatre, circus, film, and television, for over 15 years. He co-designed and constructed an underwater rendition of George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Miami City Ballet. The Kitty Leech Award goes to a designer early in their career, whose promise has “come to fruition.” Previous honorees include Toni-Leslie James and Paul Tazewell.
Masten has designed productions around the world—from the Public Theater to Theatre du Rhin to Paul Taylor Dance Company, and has created clothes for Tony-winning designers like Gregg Barnes, Jane Greenwood, Susan Hilferty, and William Ivey Long.
Sharaff herself was a designer. The inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award from TDF, which now bears her name, was granted to her in 1993. Now, the Award goes to a designer who has demonstrated the same quality of work through “a keen sense of color, a feeling for material and texture, an eye for shape and form, and a sure command of the craft.”
Previous winners include Tony winners Jane Greenwood (The Little Foxes), Willa Kim (The Will Rogers Follies, Sophisticated Ladies), Ann Roth (The Nance), William Ivey Long (Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella, Grey Gardens, Hairspray), and Catherine Zuber (The King and I, The Royal Family), as well as three-time Oscar nominee Bob Mackie.
The awards are presented through the TDF Costume Collection, which celebrates and preserves the wardrobes donated by Broadway, Off-Broadway, opera, film, and regional productions. With over 80,000 costumes and accessories, the clothing is available for rental to non-profit theatres, universities, schools, and more. The collection also serves as a resource for the study of costume design.
Take a look inside the Awards from years past:
