Caroline O'Brien, PhD
costume designer

Caroline O’Brien is the Chair of Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Performance and Associate Professor in Costume Design + Production. As Chair, Caroline leads the academic, creative and administrative activities within the school.

In her freelance career she has worked with major ballet and dance companies collaborating with choreographers from across North America and Europe. She worked with Canada’s National Ballet School as resident costume designer and wardrobe supervisor, a position she held for almost twenty years. In addition to costuming Caroline has worked in large-scale sculpture incorporating industrial metal textiles with fashion fabrics. Her award-winning work has been performed and exhibited across Canada and internationally, and her designs were selected for the inaugural World Stage Design, 2005. She curated Sixty Years of Designing the Ballet for The National Ballet of Canada, whch was awarded the Richard Martin citation for excellence in costume curation by the Costume Society of America. Her recent research focuses on design processes in costume practice and the use of costume in training professional dancers. She has contributed to Luce Irigaray’s Building a New World (Palgrave) and The Oxford Handbook to Contemporary Ballet.

For Peggy Baker Dance Projects: Caroline was a key collaborator with Peggy from 1988 - 2015, designing costumes for fractured black, stone leaf shell skin, Aleatoric Duet No. 2, Piano/Quartet, coalesce, earthling, Radio Play, A Woman By A Man, Krishna’s Mouth, The Transparent Recital, Yang, Unfold, Words Fail, furthermore, Sylvan Quartet, Strand, Encoded Revision, Why The Brook Wept, Black Border with Moving Figures, Her Heart (3rd dance), and The Windows.