From Plays to Displays, a Costume Designer Pursues Her Passion

With a needle and thread and a passion for historical costumes, Jazmine Carroll brings the characters of local theater productions to life. Currently living in Peterborough after earning her master's degree in historical costumes at Arts University Bournemouth in the United Kingdom from 2024 to 2025, Carroll was born in the Boston area and lived in Fitzwilliam from the ages of 6 to 16. She was homeschooled for parts of her childhood and took classes for many years at MoCo Arts in Keene, where she began teaching in the C.A.K.E. Summer Program at the age of 16 while living in Peterborough. After high school, she attended Bennington College with a focus on costume design, returning to Keene post-graduation to be a costumer for MoCo Arts. From a young age, the arts were a strong family influence, from both her musician father and her grandmother, who began to teach her to sew at the early age of six. When her grandmother passed away, Carroll was 12 and that was a turning point, she said, as she became more serious about the pursuit as a way to reconnect and feel close to her. Sewing became an important part of her education, from math skills to history lessons, and she recalls researching the history of medieval costumes to sew a "Saint Joan" costume from a bedsheet. In college, she originally wanted to pursue voice and acting but saw costume classes offered and immediately knew they would be a part of her future story. She founded the Rude Mechanicals Theatre Ensemble in 2011 where she did a combination of producing, directing and costuming. "We all tried everything," she said of the collective experience and the productions. "It was so much fun. It's beneficial to understand everyone's role and to appreciate it all." Some of her other collaborations include working with The Edge Ensemble Theatre Company, Silverthorne Theater, Vermont Theater Company, Staying New Production (San Francisco), Wagner in Vermont and the Raylynmor Opera. She began costuming for Northfield Mount Hermon School in 2016 and was there for eight years before pursuing her master's degree in the U.K. "The things we got to see and the history were just mind-blowing," she said of her time studying abroad. "There are incredible collections there. It was such a wonderful time." When she returned, she costumed the musical production of "Les Miserable High School Edition" for Brattleboro Union High School's music department, which was performed in February. This summer, she will be working with New England Youth Theatre in Brattleboro on its production of "Arms and the Man," a comedic play by George Bernard Shaw that's set during the 1880s Bulgarian-Serbian war. In between shows, she works on commissions and assists with the costumes of historical re-enactors, as well as taking other seamstress requests as needed. She'll be teaching upcoming classes at MAXT Makerspace in Peterborough and a workshop with New England Youth Theatre that will be tied into the summer production. She's also been talking with a camp in California about teaching there in the future. Additionally, she enjoys working with local museums and historical societies on their period clothing collections, including research and archiving a collection of garments owned by the Historical Society of Cheshire County and constructing a muslin dress to be worn beneath a 1700s cloak owned by the Monadnock Center for History and Culture in Peterborough. One of her dreams has been to develop sewing patterns based on historical garments, and she now has the skills from graduate school to pursue this type of passion project. She says that she has always preferred the period pieces when working in theater and had very little interest in constructing modern-day clothing, preferring corsets and hoop skirts to the costumes of "High School Musical." Historical clothing is one of the only ways that we can envision how a person from these time periods might have actually looked, she said, adding, "It's poignant. It brings the past to life for us." She enjoys having the ability and flexibility to do both theater costuming as well as historical pieces and says that the two worlds inform each other. Building a display in a museum is much like the staging and blocking of theater, she explained, in that they both seek to create an environment that will transport an audience and suspend disbelief. "The history side really fuels my muse to be more creative, to have sources to draw from and to create something new," she said of how they intertwine. For more information or to contact Carroll, visit jazminecarroll.com.