Katharina W
- Research Program Mentor

MFA at New York University

Expertise

Fashion history, fashion design, art history, costume design for stage and film

Bio

I grew up trilingual in England, France, and Germany before attending Brown University to study fashion history and design. For my thesis, I designed and sewed a 12-look fashion collection that showed during Brown University Fashion Week. I also completed an intensive fashion design program at the Istituto Marangoni in Milan, where I learned to develop both menswear and womenswear collections and worked backstage at several Milan Fashion Week shows. I went on to complete my MFA in Costume Design at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and am currently working as a costume designer for film and television in New York. My recent projects include the NYU graduate theater production of Suddenly Last Summer directed by Pamela Berlin and the music video Religion for British pop singer Shura. My work is motivated by the precision and logic of clothing construction and my love of visual storytelling. I enjoy making my own clothes and learning about fashion history in my free time.

Project ideas

Project ideas are meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.

Fashion Collection

Develop a concept for a fashion line. Make moodboards, swatch cards, technical drawings, and fashion sketches of your finished collection.

Costume Design

This project involves developing a costume design concept for theatre or film from initial concept sketches and visual research to technical drawings by hand or in Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop

Historical fashion Research

This project involves learning how to conduct research and sketch technical drawings to produce historically accurate reproductions of clothing from a particular time period (for example: Regency era, Edwardian period, 1930's, 1950's). Depending on the student's previous experience, this project could also have a sewing component.

Languages I know

native in German, French, fluent in Italian, elementary Japanese

Teaching experience

I previously taught costume design and construction at a college level. Additionally, I worked as a teaching assistant for Introduction to Costume Construction at Brown University and as a debate instructor for the Rhode Island Urban Debate League.