Caroline O'Brien

Caroline O’Brien was appointed Chair of the School of Performance in 2019 and is Associate Professor in Costume Design and Making. As Chair, Caroline leads the academic, creative and administrative activities within the school. Prior to taking on this role, she worked as Director of Production, with key contributions to teaching, revising curriculum and enhancing the student learning experience.

Caroline holds a PhD from The National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland and MA from York University.  She has held artist residencies at Artscape Gibraltar Point in Toronto and MEC (Maison des Etudiants Canadiens) in Paris.

In her freelance career she has worked with major ballet and dance companies collaborating with choreographers from across North America and Europe, and has a long-standing collaborative relationship with Peggy Baker, Artistic Director of Peggy Baker Dance Projects. 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 is represented in private collections and 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, 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.  Her current projects emphasize storytelling through archival research with textile installation.  She has contributed to Luce Irigaray’s Building a New World (Palgrave) and The Oxford Handbook to Contemporary Ballet.

Caroline works with Metcalf Foundation as Performing Arts Internship Advisor and serves as Chair on the Tarragon Theatre Board of Directors.