When it comes to big-scale productions, we all became enamored with the music, the voices, and more importantly, the costumes. Some costumes stay with us years after the production holds its first performance.
Enter renowned costume designer Paul Tazewell.
Tazewell is a career costume designer with specialties in opera, dance, film, television, and theatre. His career began in 1996 with the Broadway musical, “Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk.”
Originally from Akron, Ohio, he started attending North Carolina School of the Arts and New York University Tisch School of the Arts. Tazewell has gone on to design costumes for quite a few famous productions. Some of the more famous ones are “In The Heights,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “The Color Purple,” “Wicked” and many, many more.
During his career, Tazewell has created costume designs for more than a dozen Broadway shows, with a majority of the plays having a predominantly Black and Latino cast.
Paul has also been known to mark many historic moments, including being the first Black male costume designer to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Costume Design (Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story”) in 2021, and more recently, being the first openly gay Black man to win an Oscar in the Best Costume Design category. While he’s worked on 29 theater productions, he’s also done work for more than stage plays, including the three television productions and five films he’s worked on.
He’s created costumes for ballet companies, operas and regional theaters. The ballet companies are the Bolshoi Ballet, the Boston Ballet and Washington’s very own Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle. For operas, he’s worked with the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, English National Opera, Glimmerglass Opera, Metropolitan Opera, Houston Grand Opera and the Washington National Opera. Finally, the regional theatres for which he designed costumes include Goodman Theatre, Arena Stage, La Jolla Playhouse, Alley Theatre and Guthrie Theatre.
Tazewell has quite the record when it comes to awards. He’s been nominated for 21 awards in costume design and won about 15 awards for costume design.
Recently, he won an Oscar for Best Costume Design for the movie “Wicked,” starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. Of the works that got him a Tony nomination, some of them include 2010’s “Memphis,” 2019’s “Ain’t Too Proud,” 2022’s “MJ,” 2008’s “In The Heights,” 2024’s “Suffs,” 2006’s “The Color Purple” and 2012’s “A Streetcar Named Desire.” He won a Tony for Best Costume Design of a Musical for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton” in 2016. A few other notable awards he’s won are an Academy Award, British Academy Film Award, and a Primetime Emmy Award. His Primetime Emmy Award was for his costume design in “The Wiz Live!” from 2016. With over three decades of costume design under his belt and the awards to show for it, we can’t wait to see what he does next! He will be coming back as the costume designer for “Wicked: For Good,” which is set to release later this year.
To learn more about Paul Tazewell, he has an Internet Broadway Database, IMDb page, and an official website at paultazewelldesign.com.