Laura Hanson has designed and/or crafted costumes for professional theatres in the St. Louis area, such as The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, Opera Theatre of St. Louis, Avalon Theatre, Hot City Theatre, Upstream Theatre, and Insight Theatre Company. Her designs have also been seen at the Prague International Theatre Festival and the Santiago Ballet and Danza del Caribe in Cuba.
While living in New York, Laura worked for some of the major professional costume shops, crafting costumes for Broadway, off-Broadway, national tours, New York City Ballet and Opera, and American Ballet Theatre. At New York University’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts she taught Costume Stagecraft and supervised the Costume Shop in the Department of Design for Stage and Film. For NYU’s Second Avenue Dance Company, she crafted costumes for pieces choreographed by Doug Varone, Ann Reinking, Mark Morris, and Bill T. Jones, among others.
Laura is currently a Professor and Head of Design and Technical Theater at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where she has designed costumes for over 35 productions, including Into the Woods, Carmina Burana, A Servant of Two Masters, The Importance of Being Earnest, Ubu Roi, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Antigone, Twelfth Night, and numerous pieces for Dance in Concert.
She earned her Ph.D. in Educational Theatre from NYU, and has also taught at Marymount Manhattan College in New York and St. Louis University in St. Louis, MO.