West Bay Opera

Katherine Irvine Mills

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Katherine Irvine Mills is the costume designer for The Magic Flute, marking her return to West Bay Opera after more that two decades. Her first professional costume design was for the WBO presentation of two short operas, Cavalleria rusticana and The Old Maid and the Thief (Menotti) in 1973. Two years later, she designed Macbeth for WBO and soon after returned to San José State University to complete a Masters in theatre history and a MFA degree in costume design, working with Long Beach Opera and English National Opera even before she completed her studies.

Ms. Mills’ recent costume designs for opera include Orfeo et Euridice for Bay Area Summer Opera Theatre Institute, and Orpheus in the Underworld and Dido and Aeneas for Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont. Her designs have appeared at the Almeda Theatre in London and at the Edinburgh Festival. Her design work in the Bay Area includes Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night for Berkeley Shakespeare Festival, Breaking the Code, Eastern Standard, and Nebraska for The Magic Theatre, Very Last Lover of the River Cane for San José Repertory Theatre, and designs for The New Dance Company and San José State Dance Department. For the past ten years Mills has been the costume designer for Notre Dame de Namur University, where her design work includes Measure for Measure, Wild Honey, The Good Woman of Setzuan, The Skin of Our Teeth, Medea, The Imaginary Invalid, and the world premier of the play, Dead Man Walking, as well as the musicals Oklahoma!, Rags, Oliver, and Godspell.

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