Suttirat Anne Larlarb


Suttirat Anne Larlarb is an American costume designer, art director and production designer. She is also an Associate Professor in Costume Design at Carnegie Mellon University.

Life

Larlarb's parents are both Thai, and came to the US as Fulbright scholars. Her father went on to become a heart surgeon. Larlarb was born in North Carolina and raised in Ventura County, California. She was interested in drawing from an early age, and attended Stanford University where she studied studio art, before winning a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship and entering Yale University's School of Drama MFA program, where she studied under Ming Cho Lee. She joined the faculty of the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama in October 2013.
Larlarb moved to London after graduating, and worked as Assistant Designer, responsible for sets and costumes, to theatrical designer Richard Hudson. The first major film on which she worked was Danny Boyle's The Beach; Larlarb has worked many times with Boyle since, both in film productions, theatrical productions, and for the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony in London.
Larlarb was Designer of the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, together with Mark Tildesley. She also designed the costumes and the 'dove bikes'. She spoke of the creative brainstorming process in developing the ceremony between Boyle, Tildesley and writer Frank Cottrell Boyce: "It was so open. It could be anything. We were bouncing around every idea that came into your head about what was essentially British. Not being British, I could represent what the world thought Britain meant. Our mantra was that everything should feel human-scale: individual and idiosyncratic, less about slickness and perfection." For her work on the ceremony, Larlarb was listed as one of "London's 1000 most influential people 2012" by the London Evening Standard, which commented that "the extraordinary dove bikes her proudest achievement."

Selected stage work