Clint Ramos, visiting professor at UC Santa Cruz’s theater arts department, will be leading a lecture series for students featuring four of the costume and design industry’s top professionals. Featured guests will be Charlese Antoinette Jones on January 27, Mia Neal on February 10, Carl Goldberg on February 24, and Alice Choo Risser on March 10. The lectures will be part of Ramos’s Costume Construction class and will be made available to all UCSC students on YouTube via a password.
Costume designer and stylist Charlese Antoinette Jones has designed costumes for the last ten years and her acclaimed work can be seen in many feature films and television shows. Jones’s latest work includes the highly anticipated Judas and the Black Messiah (Daniel Kaluuya, Lakeith Stanfield, Martin Sheen and Jesse Plemmons). In addition, she has worked on projects with Warner Brothers, Columbia Pictures, NBC, ABC, Fox, Showtime, Sony, HULU and Netflix. She’s currently launching the Black Designer Database as well as her lifestyle brand CharAnt Gold.
Mia Neal is a prominent wig and hair designer whose latest work, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom starring Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman, is receiving rave reviews. Neal won the prestigious Drama Desk Award in 2016 for hair design for her work in the New York production of Shuffle Along, Or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed which starred Audra MacDonald and Billy Porter. Her other credits include the films Uncut Gems (Adam Sandler), The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (produced by Oprah Winfrey), Ghostbusters (Melissa MacCarthy, Kristen Wig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones), Chris Rock’s Top Five, and The Amazing Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone).
Founder and CEO of CEGO Shirtmaker, New York, Carl Goldberg has perfected bespoke shirt design and creates custom shirts not only for scrupulous individual customers but also for famous Broadway shows. His numerous credits include How to Succeed in Business, Hair, The Music Man, Gigi, School of Rock, Mamma Mia, Wicked, Anything Goes, Sister Act, Cabaret, Newsies, Legally Blonde, A Streetcar Named Desire, Thoroughly Modern Millie, A Chorus Line, and In the Heights. He’s also designed for the Metropolitan Opera, as well as for movies and TV shows such as Blue Bloods, Elementary, Person of Interest, Zoolander 2, White Collar, The Bourne Legacy, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Smash, and The Wolf of Wall Street.
Alice Choo Risser is the associate costume designer for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) and manages costume staff and costumes for the current season. She started her career as a stitcher and later segued into managing wardrobe. Risser is also the wardrobe supervisor for production at The Wallis Annenberg Center for The Performing Arts, costume coordinator for OSF’s Student Visit Program, costume workshop leader at OSF and Southern Oregon University’s Center for Shakespeare Studies, interim crafts supervisor, and interim costume director team member.
Clint Ramos is an award-winning costume and set designer, best known for his work on several Broadway productions, including Eclipsed for which he won the Tony Award for Best Costume Design in a Play. He has received two additional Tony Award nominations for his work on the 2018 Broadway revival of Once on This Island, and the 2019 Broadway revival of Torch Song. He was the first person of color to receive the Tony Award for Best Costume Design in a Play. Ramos was recently profiled by the UC Santa Cruz Arts Division.
For more information about the UC Santa Cruz Arts Division, visit: arts.ucsc.edu.