Artist’s Passion Takes Center Stage

Every night for two straight months in 1987, Susan Chiang ’73, commandeered her family dining room, threw a pot of coffee on the stove, and toiled alone through the painstaking process of designing and building 95 original classical ballet costumes.

Each day she also worked, attended graduate classes, did homework and cared for her small children.

Before the show opened, Chiang, now a university lecturer and foreman of the costume shop at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, almost lost it.

“I just kept asking myself, ‘What am I doing?’ ” she recalls.

All was revealed on the opening night of Cinderella. As Chiang stood backstage and watched her work dance before a live audience, she recognized her own happy ending. That moment “really made me understand why I’m doing it,” she says.

Seeds for Chiang’s future were planted early. She grew up in a small town in Massachusetts and did what all little girls were supposed to do at the time—learned to cook, sew and dance like a ballerina. After earning a bachelor’s degree in French literature, Chiang longed for a connection to the arts, so adding to her already hectic schedule, she taught herself to make patterns and build costumes.

Artist Sue Chiang (left) designs costumes like these from The Green Bird (bottom inset and right) and Night from Day (inset).

Her “pumpkin” of a dining room turned into a fully equipped shop at the center, overrun with headless mannequins, sewing machines and steam irons that are fed water through I.V.-style containers suspended from the ceiling. For Chiang, it is the organized chaos she craves—and she is lonely no more.

“The beauty of working in here is that I have help,” Chiang says. She credits her professional happiness to a team of skilled students and faculty who work together constructing costumes for theater, music and opera performances.

Her freelance costuming experience inspired her to pursue a master of fine arts degree, which she completed in 1992.

Six years later, Chiang joined the university as a makeup lecturer after she received a call from the then-chair of the Department of Theatre, Roger Meersman, who knew of her work in the local arts community.

Chiang says the university’s commitment to the arts has come a long way from her days as a dance student in “The Gulch,” an uninspired cluster of army surplus buildings that once housed the department. She says Maryland’s value for the arts was made clear when construction for the Clarice Smith Center started in the late ’90s.

“Their focus and their mission dovetails so well with what I value as an artist, and that’s important to me,” says Chiang. “It’s such a gift to be able to do what I love.” —CW

Chiang’s work will take center stage in The Ash Girl, running Feb. 28-March 8 at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.

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