Irina Kruzhilina is a theatre artist, painter, and fashion designer. Her work has been featured at internationally prestigious venues, and she has worked extensively with acclaimed directors and theatre organizations throughout the US. For Mabou Mines she designed the costumes of the show Song for New York, directed by Ruth Maleczech, which was performed on a barge in Gantry Plaza State Park in Queens, New York. Previous collaborations with David Chambers (Yale School of Drama) include Merchant of Venice (at Milwaukee Shakespeare Theatre) and Don Juan in Prague (at the National Theater in Prague and Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York). With Ken Roht she designed costumes for Offenbach!!!, a series of operettas performed at Fisher Center for Performing Arts at Bard College. Recently, her costumes for Petrushka with director Doug Fitch were seen at the University of Maryland Concert Hall.
Critics have called her «Neo-Romantic/Constructivist costumes» to be «an audacious collection, with influences from the Renaissance, the surreal and contemporary runway fashion», resembling «Art Deco designer Leon Bakst crossed with Christian Lacroix». In addition to her work for the stage Irina also designs for fashion, film and music video, and she has an active career as a painter. The main inspiration and underlying theme of her work is the human body, and its relationship to movement, space, shape, time, emotion, and story. She explores these relationships through the creation of costumes, puppets, and paintings, mixing diverse types of materials.
Whether applied to contemporary or classical plays, Irina’s costumes always aim to provide novel perspectives by creating characters which can bring a real visual, social or political message to the audience. Her costumes are always designed and build from scratch, which bring even modestly sized performances to visually high levels.
Irina obtained MFA degrees in fashion design from Moscow Textile University in 2000, and in costume design from California Institute of the Arts in 2004. Irina has been honored for her work by several prestigious awards, including the 2007 NEA/TCG Career Development Program For Theatre Designers.
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Critics have called her «Neo-Romantic/Constructivist costumes» to be «an audacious collection, with influences from the Renaissance, the surreal and contemporary runway fashion», resembling «Art Deco designer Leon Bakst crossed with Christian Lacroix». In addition to her work for the stage Irina also designs for fashion, film and music video, and she has an active career as a painter. The main inspiration and underlying theme of her work is the human body, and its relationship to movement, space, shape, time, emotion, and story. She explores these relationships through the creation of costumes, puppets, and paintings, mixing diverse types of materials.
Whether applied to contemporary or classical plays, Irina’s costumes always aim to provide novel perspectives by creating characters which can bring a real visual, social or political message to the audience. Her costumes are always designed and build from scratch, which bring even modestly sized performances to visually high levels.
Irina obtained MFA degrees in fashion design from Moscow Textile University in 2000, and in costume design from California Institute of the Arts in 2004. Irina has been honored for her work by several prestigious awards, including the 2007 NEA/TCG Career Development Program For Theatre Designers.
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