Judy Dearing

Judy Dearing grew up in Manhattan and graduated from City College of New York, majoring in mathematics and science. She began her performance arts career dancing with Miriam Makeba and acting with the Negro Ensemble Company. Her husband was John Parks, a dancer who collaborated with her on a number of dance productions.[1]

Dearing was a resident designer for the Crossroads Theatre, the University of Texas Drama Department, the New Federal Theatre, and the Negro Ensemble Company, as well as for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. She designed costumes for a number of regional theaters: Goodman Theatre, the Alliance Theatre, the Hartford Stage, the Guthrie Theatre, the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, GeVa Theatre, Asolo Theatre, Kennedy Center, Mark Taper Forum, the Egg, and the Goodspeed Opera House.[2] In addition, Dearing was a professor of design at Howard University and resident designer at the University of Texas drama department.[3]

Dearing was a recipient of nine AUDELCO Awards, a 1985 Obie Award and a 1988 Beverly Hills/Hollywood NAACP Image Award. She won the Obie Award her for her World War II uniforms for Charles Fuller's Pulitzer Prize winning drama "A Soldier's Play."[4] She died at New York Hospital in 1995 of acute pneumonia.[5]

Dearing's designs were celebrated for their authenticity. She developed a folkloric look for the 1990 production of Once on This Island, using printed kente cloth, Dutch cotton prints, raw silk, and chiffon with metallics. "A costume has to appear natural," Ms. Dearing said in an interview that year with The New York Times. "Every night, she added, 'everything has to be set up to look realistic." The Times article indicates that the authenticity of her World War II uniforms is what won her the Obie award for A Soldier's Play.[10]

In the 2010 edition of Ntozake Shange's book, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, the author describes Dearing's costumes in the book's 1976-78 theater adaptation:

The fluid dresses, designed by the late Judy Dearing, took on colors from the set design, imbuing each lady with a persona and each persona with a unique deific principle marking the journey of womanhood. The personal story of a woman became every woman, the solo voice becoming many. Each poem fell into its rightful place, a rainbow of colors, shapes, and timbres of voice, my solo instrument blossoming into a cosmic chamber ensemble.[11]

In 1996, The Black Theatre Network established the biennial Judy Dearing Design Competition to encourage African American students of design.[12]