Biography
Deborah Nadoolman grew up in New York City, often standing at the back of theaters during Broadway shows after school. She received the first Costume Design grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States. After earning her M.A. in Costume Design from UCLA in 1975, she began her career in wardrobe at NBC television. Her adaptability proved invaluable to director John Landis on The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), which combined a dozen distinct short segments into a unified film. Nadoolman met Landis during her freshman year of college through mutual friends from his high school. Despite Landis being a high school dropout, their relationship blossomed into a long-term professional collaboration, producing comedy classics such as National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) and The Blues Brothers (1980). She also contributed to Steven Spielberg's 1941 (1979), capturing the elaborate 1940s period costumes.
Her collaboration with Spielberg continued with the iconic Indiana Jones costume in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). She also worked with Louis Malle on Crackers (1984) and Costa Gavras on Mad City (1997). Additional projects with John Landis included Trading Places (1983), An American Werewolf in London (1981), ¡Three Amigos! (1986), Coming to America (1988), and the groundbreaking Michael Jackson music video Thriller (1983), which won MTV’s first music video award.
Nadoolman served two terms as president of The Costume Designers Guild, Local 892, representing Hollywood costume designers. She contributed the chapter "Designing Hollywood: Women Costume and Production Designers" to Women Designers in the USA 1900 - 2000, edited by Pat Kirkham (Yale University Press, 2000), and compiled and edited the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences catalogue 50 Costumes/50 Designers: Concept to Character (University of California Press, 2004). She authored Screencraft: Costume Design (Focal Press, 2003), Dressed: A Century of Hollywood Costume Design (Harper Collins, 2007), and FilmCraft: Costume Design (Focal Press, 2012). Nadoolman wrote the first doctoral dissertation on film costume design, Scene and Not Heard: The Role of Costume in the Cinematic Storytelling Process, earning her PhD in the History of Design from the Royal College of Art in 2003. She holds the David C. Copley Chair in Costume Design at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television and directs the David C. Copley Center for the Study of Costume Design at UCLA. She also served as senior curator for the Hollywood Costume exhibition, which opened on October 20, 2012, at the V&A Museum in London.
Her award-winning theatrical work includes productions for the Virginia Opera ("Turandot," 1993), American Conservatory Theater ("Dinner at Eight," 1992; "Gaslight," 1995), and the Mark Taper Forum ("The Waiting Room," 1994; "Closer," 2000).
