Archives West Finding Aid

Linda Kay Sarver was born in Rockford, Illinois on April 19, 1953, the second daughter and youngest of three children of Everett and Ruth Sarver. The Sarver family has lived in Rockford since 1847, and Linda grew up on the family farm. The Sarvers emigrated to America in the 17th century and Linda was a Daughter of the American Revolution. As a child, she drew and made clothes for her dolls, and showed a keen interest in the fine arts. Childhood visits to Chicago’s Art Institute and watching Kenneth Clark’s television series Civilization influenced her early interests profoundly.

Linda was Valedictorian of her 1971 class at Auburn Senior High School in Rockford, where she played the lead role in the senior class play and was an editor of the yearbook.

Sarver was educated at Drake University in Iowa where she began as a fine arts major with a gift for portraiture, but shifted to theatre with a focus on design. During the summer after her freshman year she was a “NIT”, attending the National Theatre Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in Connecticut where she studied with directors Peter Brook and Lloyd Richards, and costume designer Fred Voelpel. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1975. She completed a Master of Arts at Western Illinois University and then a Master of Fine Arts at Ohio University, where she created her own academic program that included internships with the Indiana Repertory Theatre and The Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. In 1977 she took pride in earning membership in United Scenic Artists local 829, the national union for theatre designers, by passing the union’s rigorous, 3-day examination.

Sarver’s academic career began at Marquette University in Milwaukee and moved to Florida State University, where she headed the graduate and undergraduate programs in costume design. In 1998 she was recruited by the University of Utah to head all the graduate and undergraduate programs in design and to be a Resident Costume Designer for the Pioneer Theatre Company, the professional theatre affiliated with the University. She was advanced to Full Professor, but had to resign from the University in 2004 after she became disabled, the result of injuries when a car struck her as she crossed a street. That event ended her professional career as a designer, as well as her academic career, just as she was reaching new heights in both careers at age forty-five.

She described herself as a life-long student, and throughout and beyond her dual careers Linda continued to pursue her education. She took master classes in America from celebrated designer Ming Cho Lee, in Canada from Desmond Heeley, and in London from Pamela Howard at the European Scenography Centre. Her intellectual interests included many fields of the arts and literature, notably the history of theatrical costuming, Elizabethan drama, classical architecture, antique furniture, and studies in Egyptology with Professor Salima Ikram of the American University in Cairo.

As a professional theatre artist, Linda was primarily a costume designer for the stage, though she was expanding into scenography and dramaturgy when her career was cut short. She designed internationally for the Hong Kong Repertory Theatre (Chekhov’s Three Sisters), the Saidye Bronfman Theatre in Montreal (Driving Miss Daisy), and the Falaki Theatre in Cairo, Egypt (Autumn in New York). She designed for America’s commercial theatre (the national tour of The Wonders of Magic) and for resident theatres and Shakespeare festivals from Boston to San Diego, from Berkeley to Sarasota. She was Resident Costume Designer for the Pioneer Theatre Company for nine seasons, and she designed for the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, among many. Her work was seen in film (52 Pickup, with Roy Scheider) and television (Moonlighting, with Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd).

Linda received many awards for design and for her academic achievements, starting in the 1990s with inclusion in Outstanding Young Women of America and her election several years later to membership in the National Theatre Conference (which she served for six years as co-editor of Broadside, its annual publication). Her bio is found in the 27th edition of Who’s Who in the West and the 2000 edition of Outstanding Artists and Designers of the 20th Century. She was twice nominated for Best Costume Design by the Denver Theatre Critics; she was awarded the John R. Park Teacher’s Fellowship; she was a member of three U.S. Delegations to the Prague Quadrennial of Theatre Design in the Czech Republic; and she was one of a team of four that was honored by The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences with a citation for Outstanding Achievement in Costuming for the ABC-TV mini-series North and South, Book I.

Linda was author or co-author of her five books and many articles in academic and trade journals. She illustrated several books and was a Contributing Research Consultant for Blueprints of Fashion. Her textbook, Another Opening, Another Show, co-written with her husband Tom Markus, was a standard in the field for over a decade. A Novel Approach to Theatre is a collection of short, humorous reviews of over 500 novels about the theatre. The Cairo Diaries 2004-2006 describes her two years living in Egypt.

Linda served as dramaturg for the Pioneer Theatre Company for nine seasons, and her dramaturgical research supported productions at theatres from Massachusetts to Mississippi.

In her personal life, travel and cooking were two of her great joys. She visited over twenty nations in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia and learned to prepare native foods from many of them, to the delight of her family, friends, colleagues, and houseguests.

Images of her designs and samples of her books and articles, along with detailed information about her career, may be viewed on her website: www.lindasarverstudio.com