Abigail Mansfield Coleman

Abigail Mansfield Coleman is a costume designer and lover of all things textiles currently based out of Iowa City, Iowa. She is finishing a Master of Fine Arts degree in May 2023 at the University of Iowa in Theatre Design. Her areas of expertise include costume design, makeup design, and mask and puppetry crafts/design.
She has costume designed over 50 productions from large musicals, to intimate new works. Some favorites include Into the Woods (3 times!); Carousel; String; My Favorite Year; Anything Goes; Tuck Everlasting, The Musical (2018 KCATCF Region IV Faculty Costume Design Nomination); Exit the King (2017 KCATCF Region IV Faculty Costume Design nomination); Annie Get Your Gun; Shrek: The Musical; Shakespeare’s Henry V, As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, and many more.

Her work has taken her from the Carolinas all the way to London, U.K, where she spent part of her summer in 2022 working on costumes, large structural elements, and walking in the Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee Parade with Mahogany Carnival Designs.

Before coming to Iowa, Abigail was the costume shop manager and production costume designer at Shorter University in Rome, GA. There she designed costumes for two plays, two musicals, and one opera an academic year. She instructed undergraduate students in learning the art of costume design, sewing skills, working wardrobe crew for productions, and how to pull and design their own costumes for class projects. Abigail also worked at her local community arts school, Gaston School of the Arts, as the resident costume designer from 2014-2015 teaching and costuming students ages K-12th for various summer camps, full fledged productions, and class projects. Her teaching career continued as she pursued her Master’s, instructing undergraduate students in Makeup for Stage Design, Mask and Puppetry Crafts, and mentoring undergraduate designers.

She had the privilege to work on productions with the following:
University of Iowa Department of Theatre Arts, Riverside Theatre, Mahogany Carnival Design (London, UK), Sigmon Theatrical, The Children’s Theatre of Charlotte, Shorter University Theatre, Shorter University Opera, Rome Shakespeare Festival, Rome Little Theatre, Gaston School of the Arts, Encore Theatre Guild, and The Abbey Players.

Abigail is excited to add ICON to this list: “I love collaboration within the art of theatre. Working with a director and other designers to craft the visual representation of a show is a very humbling and unique experience. And now I get to do that collaborative act with other teaching artists, using those same principles to create a dynamic performance curriculum and environment for students to thrive in the arts!”

In her limited spare time, she loves cooking new dishes from around the world with her husband Kyle, traveling, moving furniture around her house, making music, knitting, & reading the mountain of books she continues to accumulate from local bookshops.