Campus News

For the second year in a row, Professor of Performing Arts Jeff Hendry has received the award for Best Costume Design from Broadwayworld.com for his work on Mamma Mia! which ran Aug.  10 – 27, 2016. The show was a production of Maine State Music Theatre, a professional musical theater organization located on the Bowdoin College campus in Brunswick, Maine. Professor Hendry won the 2015 Best Costume Design award for Sister Act and The Music Man.

Professor Hendry has been with Rockford University since 1982. Originally from Arizona, where he received a bachelor of fine arts in theatre production from the University of Arizona, he moved to the east coast to study at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and received his master of fine arts in costume design.‌ ‌‌‌‌

Throughout his career, Hendry has worked at a variety of regional theatres on both coasts including the Old Globe Theatre, Champlain Shakespeare Festival, Tennessee Williams Arts Center, and New London Barn Playhouse. Here at Rockford University, besides teaching the courses in costume design and designing costumes for all the mainstage productions, he teaches in the musical theater program in addition to teaching a variety of other courses such as Introduction to Theatre, Performing Arts Seminar and Senior Seminar, as well as directing a production each year. Some of the favorite productions which he has directed include, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Pericles, Rashomon, A Little Night Music, Phantom and Angels in America Part 1.

Besides his costuming work at the university, Hendry has designed for the University of Wisconsin at both Stevens Point and Madison where he collaborated with nationally syndicated cartoonist Nicole Hollander on a musical version of her comic strip Sylvia’s Real Good Advice. Regionally, Hendry has designed costumes for the Fireside Theatre, Circa’ 21 Dinner Playhouse and Little Theatre on the Square, (where he received a Herald Award for his designs for Babes in Arms). In the Chicago area, his designs have appeared on the stages of Northlight Theater (Everything’s Ducky, It Ain’t Nothing But the Blues- with Broadway director Randal Mlyer), Chicago Shakespeare Theatre (The Little Mermaid), Theatre at the Center (Gypsy, Grand Hotel), Drury Lane Water Tower Place (Grand Hotel), and Drury Lane Evergreen Park, where he designed 29 productions including; Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, Sophisticated Ladies, Phantom and West Side Story and received two prestigious Joseph Jefferson Award nominations, (Chicago’s Tony Award) for his designs for Jerry’s Girls and Singin’ in the Rain.

Mamma Mia! costumes designed by Jeff Hendry

Contact Rita Elliott, Director of Communications, 815.226.3374