Meet Costume Designer Lauryn Terceira

Feature by Voyage LA

Lauryn Terceira, M.F.A. '19, Costume Design

Today we’d like to introduce you to Lauryn Terceira.

Lauryn, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Though my official job title reads ‘Costume Designer,’ the work is one of a narrative artist. I’m not just creating clothes, I’m building character and enhancing worlds. That’s where I am currently, but this journey began years ago. I won’t take you through my earliest memory, which involves Costco and a child leash, but as a kid my mother would read to me from my grandpa’s boyhood books with browned and frayed fabric covers. These books, which I think were from the early 1900s, were filled with anthropomorphized animals. I was too young to read, so while my mother did the talking, I looked at the illustrations. There were always critters dressed in the sharpest duds and I was obsessed. I realized before I could even read that clothes could engage and deepen the value of a character in a story. I spent many an afternoon wrapping and twisting forgotten fabric scraps into gowns, trying to imitate these animals. I usually used myself as a canvas and would inevitably become trapped in the garment; extricating myself meant destroying it.

Read the entire feature on Voyage LA here.