2021 Hewes Design Awards Announced

Legendary costume designers Toni-Leslie James and Ann Roth each will be honored with a Ming Cho Lee Award for Lifetime Achievement in Design, bestowed by the Henry Hewes Design Awards at the 57th annual event on November 1 in a livestream awards ceremony.

"As audiences don their masks, show their vaccination cards, and begin to file back into our theatres, it is an exciting time for the Henry Hewes Design Awards to lift two extraordinary talents," said Jeffrey Eric Jenkins, chair of the awards committee. "After a difficult 18 months of quarantines, alienation, and cultural disruption, who better to honor than two costume designers whose individual creative excellence have made theatrical storytelling more startling, more compelling, and more beautiful.

"In honoring Toni-Leslie James and Ann Roth with the Ming Cho Lee Award for Lifetime Achievement, we consider literally thousands of images from the wide range of these two designers' experience. Every article of clothing, every piece of fabric used in the creation of their worldviews, take us deeper into their dramatic imaginations."

Given the dearth of new designs accessible to the Henry Hewes committee and the overwhelming challenges that faced members of the design community, the committee has also chosen to honor five service organizations whose efforts helped keep the design community functioning and healthy as the pandemic unfolded. The organizations to be honored are United Scenic Artists Local 829, the Costume Industry Coalition (CIC), the See Lighting Foundation, the Theatrical Sound Designers and Composers Association (TSDCA), and Wingspace. Representatives of these organizations will be invited to speak about their vision and mission at the online ceremony, where they will be presented with a citation and a donation from the Henry Hewes Foundation for Theater Arts.

The online award ceremony will be hosted on Monday, November 1, at 8 pm (Eastern USA time) via Zoom webinar by Krannert Center for the Performing Arts and Illinois Theatre at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.