Set, Costume & Exhibition Designer

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Bio & Press

PROFILE

A/Prof Anna Cordingley APDG is an award-winning set and costume designer for theatre, opera, dance, musical theatre and cabaret whose designs have been seen by audiences throughout Australia, Europe, Britain and the United States. She also designs exhibitions and events; and creates public art and installation.

© Daniel Boud

Recent stage credits include: for San Francisco Opera: IDOMENEO (with Opera Australia & Victorian Opera); for Back to Back Theatre, MULTIPLE BAD THINGS; for Sydney Opera House, AMADEUS; for Opera Australia, THE MAGIC FLUTE, CARMEN, AIDA; for Victorian Opera, CASSANDRA ECHO & NARCISSIS, SALOME, SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE, THE THREEPENNY OPERA (with Sydney Theatre Company and Malthouse); for Opera Queensland, DON GIOVANNI; for Melbourne Theatre Company, SUNDAY, STORM BOY (with Queensland Theatre), JASPER JONES, ABIGAIL’S PARTY; for Bell Shakespeare, ANTHONY AND CLEOPATRA, RICHARD III; for Malthouse, HOUR OF THE WOLF, ANNA K, MEOW MEOW'S LITTLE MERMAID, A GOLEM STORY, TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE, FURIOUS MATTRESS, HAPPY DAYS (with Belvoir), KNIVES IN HENS (with South Australian Theatre Company), A COMMERCIAL FARCE; for Chunky Move, AN ACT OF NOW, CONNECTED; for Dead Puppets Society, PETER AND THE STARCATCHER, HOLDING ACHILLES (with Legs On The Wall).

Anna’s exhibition designs and installations have featured at the State Library of Victoria, Arts Centre Melbourne, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, The Sage Gateshead and Baltic Contemporary Art Centre.

Anna won the Helpmann Award for Best Set Design for Jasper Jones, A Sydney Theatre Award and APDG Award for Amadeus, has two Green Room Awards and numerous further nominations. She has won the Kristian Fredrikson Memorial Scholarship for Design, the John Vickery Scholarship and the Australian Students Prize.

She is Associate Director (Learning and Teaching) at the Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne, where she is also an Associate Professor in Design, Head of Design & Production and a PhD Candidate.

Anna is a visiting lecturer at SRH Hochschule für Kommunikation und Design, Berlin.

DESIGN HIGHLIGHTS

Costume Collaboration on AMADEUS with Legendary Australian Fashion Label ROMANCE WAS BORN to celebrate The Sydney Opera House’s Fiftieth Birthday

Recipient of the 2012 Kristian Fredrikson Memorial Scholarship, resulting in placements in Essen (Ruhe Triennial 2013), Berlin (Komische Oper) and London (The Warburg Institute).

Malthouse Artist in Residence (Set & Costume Design) 2009-2011 Creating work with the likes of Michael Kantor, Paul Jackson, Marion Potts, Richard Gill, Lucy Guerin, Gideon Obarzanek, Wesley Enoch, Geordie Brookman & Aidan Fennessy.

Facilitation for Brook Andrew in The Hague Sculpture 2007 De Overkant/Downunder, The Netherlands.

Designer for Simon Barley (Bambuco) for various major festivals in France and the United Kingdom.

AWARDS

Anna won a Helpmann Award for Best Set Design for JASPER JONES and has won two Green Room Awards for Best Design. She received a Sydney Theatre Award and an Australian Production Design Guild Award for AMADEUS, a nomination for best set design for her work on JASPER JONES and has been nominated for numerous other Helpmann Awards, Sydney Theatre Awards and Green Room Awards. She is a recipient of the Kristian Fredrikson Memorial Scholarship for Design and the John Vickery Scholarship.

PROCESS

Anna Cordingley, Lecturer in Design, demonstrates how to digitally render a costume design. Find out more about Production at the Victorian College of the Ar...

Anna Cordingley and Scenic Artist Shane Dunn talk about bringing Craig Silvey's fictional town of Corrigan to life from page to stage (Melbourne Theatre Company's Jasper Jones by Kate Mulvany, directed by Sam Strong, 2016)

In celebration of 10 years at Southbank Theatre, set & costume designer Anna Cordingley reflects on her interwoven history with MTC. Learn more at https://ww...

PRESS

Press Quotes
- Jason Blake, The Sydney Morning Herald (for Happy Days)

A curtain opens to reveal Winnie cemented waist-deep in a pile of jagged debris reminiscent of the steel "hedgehogs" strewn on English beaches during the war, or the wreckage of an end-of-the-pier show closed early by the Luftwaffe… There's something vaguely sci-fi about Anna Cordingley's set. It seems to have a crystalline life of its own. Winnie doesn't sink into her pile of debris by Act II, rather, the pile has grown and engulfed her, leaving her peering out from what has become in effect, an outsized piece of costume. Even so, she assures us, this is another happy day…Exceptional theatre. Don't miss it.

- Jana Perkovic, Guerilla Semiotics (for Sappho… in 9 Fragments)

Sappho… in 9 fragments is first-class theatre.... It is made out of good ideas, of smart solutions. Naked, skin-headed Griffiths emerges from a glass tank filled with ambrosia, which slowly leaks throughout the performance, creating a honey-coloured pond on the floor until all that remains from the glorious poet is a tray of meat. Anna Cordingley and Paul Jackson’s set and lighting design marries absolute minimalism of means with a thorough clarity of signification: it is a high achievement of a design sensibility particular to Australian theatre.

- Cameron Woodhead, The Age (for A Golem Story)

Anna Cordingley’s set and Paul Jackson’s lighting are … I’ll leave aside superlatives and let description serve as praise. Steeped in Judaic tradition, the design takes us back through the centuries. It inspires a trace of the reverence felt on encountering the world’s great religious architecture: a Gothic thrust stage of bare timber boards, air thick with shadow; a girl lying prone, crushed under the weight of a low-hung candelabrum – one light for each of Israel’s twelve tribes; behind, a six-by-thirteen wooden matrix, symbols of the 613 mitzvoh in Jewish law. God’s presence is everywhere…

- Alison Croggon, The Australian (for Elizabeth: Almost By Chance A Woman)

The design of Elizabeth is probably the best I've seen in the Merlyn since Chamber Made's 1990 production The Fall of the House of Usher, one of the first productions in this theatre. It is a feast for the eye: Cordingley's intricate costumes distort and exaggerate the human figure, creating a cartoon effect that contrasts sharply with the human body itself, revealed in its nakedness as vulnerable and absurd, like a snail without a shell.

- Lloyd Bradford Syke, Crikey (for Julius Caesar)

Bell Shakespeare’s current, touring production of Julius Caesar is possibly the finest, most satisfying Bell production I’ve yet seen (and that’s saying something). It’s also, very possibly, the finest, most complete and completely successful theatrical production I’ve seen this year. In fact, without a shadow of a doubt, it’s one of the finest theatrical productions I’ve ever seen. Shakespeare doesn’t get any better... Anna Cordingley’s set is wonderful. Time and place are evoked, with crumbling grandeur, by a stand-alone column, around which scaffolds are deftly constructed and deconstructed by the actors, working as stagehands.