Ann Roth to Appear at Drama Book Shop for Q&A and Book Signing, 6/26

Oscar- and Tony-winning costume designer Ann Roth will appear at New York's Drama Book Shop on June 26 for a Q&A and book-signing of The Designs of Ann Roth, just published by USITT.

Roth will take questions and sign books beginning at 6 p.m. Thursday, June 26, at The Drama Book Shop, 250 W. 40th St., New York City.

The Designs of Ann Roth, by Holly Poe Durbin and Bonnie Kruger, is the latest in USITT's series of monographs on famous American theatrical designers.

Roth's career spans 50 years of film and stage. She won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design for The English Patient in 1997 and two Best Costume Design Tonys, for The Book of Mormon in 2011 and The Nance in 2013. She was inducted into Broadway's Theater Hall of Fame in 2011.

In March, she received USITT's Distinguished Achievement Award in Costume Design. She recently costumed Broadway's A Raisin in the Sun starring Denzel Washington, which just won a Tony for Best Revival of a Play.

Roth is known as "the director's secret weapon" for her painstaking research and gift for helping actors "discover" their character through her costumes. Her friend director Mike Nichols wrote the book's foreword.

The book details her career and includes many Roth renderings and photos of her work - - from 1930s period costumes for Day of the Locust (1975), Places in the Heart (1984), and The English Patient (1996), to the realism of Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Klute (1971), to the precise detail she lent Nicole Kidman's Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002) and Meryl Streep's Julia Child in Julie and Julia (2009).

Roth unveiled the book at USITT's 2014 Annual Conference & Stage Expo on March 28 in Fort Worth. At her first book-signing there, she chatted with every fan whose book she signed. The Drama Books event is her second.

USITT, the national non-profit serving backstage professionals, offers networking, training, research, safety, and creative events for the entertainment design and technology community. For more information, please visit www.usitt.org.