A.A. Bakhrushin Central State Theatre Museum

Hyun Sook Kim is a tenured associate professor of costume design in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Ball State University where she works as costume designer, teacher, and mentor in costume and makeup areas. She holds a MFA degree in Costume Design from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at the professional training center, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, and a MA degree with a thesis in Costume Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a BA from Korea University. At Ball State University, she teaches costume design, stage make-up, costume rendering, costume history, color studies, costume form and materials among others, and has successfully designed many productions such as The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Antigone, The Wild Party, Love's Labour's Lost, David Hochoy's Dance, Camino Real, The Fantasticks, Angels in America-Millennium Approaches, Major Barbara, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, Three Sisters, Iphigenia 2.0 , and others.

Kim has more than 28 years of experience as a costume designer and teacher. As an artist and educator of immense skills, she is an internationally recognized costume designer who holds a wealth of international design experiences including professional work on stages in New York, Toronto, London, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Osaka and Beijing. Professionally, she has designed costumes for large productions in various genre and style-theatre, dance, musical, opera, outdoor plays, and concerts, such as 1988 Seoul Olympics International Contemporary Dance Festival, Oedipus the King, Othello, Carmen, Richard III, A Mid Summer Night's Dream, Good Woman of Setzuan, The World of Minimalist Music, and West Side Story.

Many of her designs have been seen in large-scale venues such as the National Theatre of Korea, Seoul Arts Center, LG Arts Center and other international theatres including Bunkamura Theatre Cocoon at Tokyo, Drama City Hall at Osaka, Melbourne State Theatre among others. Particularly, her design for the mega-scale musical The Last Empress has been presented at the Lincoln Center in New York, Kodak Theatre and Schubert Theatre in Los Angeles, Hummingbird Center in Toronto, and London's West End. In July 2015, the musical celebrates its 20 year anniversary of performance and the long-run success. The award-winning costume design was presented at the Prague Quadrennial and honorably selected for the cover page of the prestigious theatre book Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre edited by Dr. Samuel L. Leiter.

Throughout the nation, she is designing costumes for professional theatres such as Stray Dog Theatre, The Human Race Theatre Company, and Pan Asian Repertory Theatre in New York City. Concurrently, Kim's costume arts have been selected and displayed in world-wide exhibitions at Anthem Gallery in New York City, Fashion Institute of Vienna, Prague Quadrennial 1999 and 2007, World Stage Design 2009 and 2013, Jakarta International Fashion Exhibition 2013, Tokyo International Costume Congress Art to Wear Exhibition 2014, International Fashion Art Biennale at Seoul Arts Center 2014, and most recently in 2015, in the history-making costume design exhibition, 'Costume at the Turn of the Century 1990-2015' at the prestigious A. A. Bakhrushin Theatre Museum in Moscow, Russia. In summer 2015, Kim was awarded the Ball State President Travel Fund for the achievement. She also won several prestigious awards, including the Korean Musical Award, Dong-A Theatre Award.

Since 1987, Kim has taught various costume design and technology classes-costume design, rendering, costume history, flat patterning, draping, life drawing, and creative fashion art-form. Through her long-time teaching experiences, she is always excited to see her students growing to think out-of-the-box and reaching out of their scope with successes. Former costume student from the Korea National University of Arts, Sang-Kyung Cho, designed movie, Oldboy, which won the prize at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, and former Ball State student, Emily Eaton, was selected to exhibit her costume design at the International Exhibition WSD 2009. More recently from 2012 to 2015, recent graduates, Delena Bradley, Hannah Combs, Jamie Whitaker, and Zoe Taylor won the Kennedy Center ACTF Awards in the Design Competitions, under her costume and makeup mentorship. Her ultimate hope is to dedicate the training of young theatre artists to make them become soulful professionals, who are eventually able to contribute to innovation of the contemporary theatre world with new creative ideas.

She is a professional member of United States Institute of Theatre Technology (USITT), International Organization of Scenographers, Theatre Architects and Technicians (OISTAT), Costume Design Group, International Costume Association, Costume Society of America, and Korean Society of Costume.

Designer Gallery

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