Charles Schoonmaker
Charles Schoonmaker is an Emmy Award-winning costume designer for theatre, dance, opera, and television.
Biography
Schoonmaker is a costume designer with extensive credits in theatre, dance, classical music, and television. He is the recipient of four Daytime Emmy Awards and a 2015 Independent Reviewers of New England (IRNE) Award for Venus in Fur at Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company. Other theatre credits include numerous productions at the Chester Theatre Company in Chester, Massachusetts; Berkshire Theatre Group; Dorset Theatre Festival; Northern Stage; Weston Playhouse; Riverside Theatre (Vero Beach, Florida), Arts Emerson; Israeli Stage Company; Commonwealth Shakespeare Company; Actors’ Shakespeare Project; and Bay Street Theatre (Sag Harbor, New York).
Schoonmaker's New York stage productions include Love and Death in the Amazon (Paradise Garage), Limonade tous les Jours (Cell Theatre), 9/11 Portraits (Union Square Theatre), and Portrait of Jennie (Henry Street Settlement). Works on Boston-area stages include Venus in Fur, God of Carnage, and A Long and Winding Road at the Huntington; The Inheritance, Nine, Violet, and The Light in the Piazza (SpeakEasy Stage); Harriet Jacobs, Constellations (Underground Railway Theater); 33 Variations, Grey Gardens (Lyric Stage); and Speed the Plow, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and The Clean House (New Repertory Theatre).
His classical music credits include productions with Boston Baroque, Boston Midsummer Opera, Music of the Baroque (Chicago), Milwaukee Symphony, Harlem Chamber Players, and the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra. Credits in concert dance include the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, Limon Company, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Atlanta Ballet, Richmond Ballet, and the Julliard School. Television credits include Another World, All My Children, and As the World Turns. Schoonmaker holds an MFA from New York University. He was a faculty member at Bennington from 2011-2023 and a visiting faculty for Spring 2024.