Ruth E. Carter's Costume Designs: From Honoring Culture to Creating Marvel's Worlds

The Commonwealth Honors College welcomes groundbreaking presenters who are working at the intersection of art praxis, racial justice, and the embodiment of change as pathways to liberation. This year's focus, supported by the Williamson Lecture Funds, is on visual storytelling within the African diaspora, and the Afro-Futurist movement. Experience the creative scholarship and the ways in which their work connects with today’s efforts to create a more inclusive world that centers Black artistry and its critical impact.

Costume design visionary Ruth E. Carter will be giving the keynote lecture for the Commonwealth Honors College Annual Black Heritage Month Celebration on February 17 at 5 p.m. in Bowker Auditorium. Her talk, titled “From Honoring Culture to Creating Marvel's Worlds: Ruth E. Carter’s Costume Designs”, will focus on visual storytelling within the African diaspora, and the Afro-Futurist movement.

Born and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, Carter was the 2019 Academy Award winner in Costume Design for Marvel’s “BLACK PANTHER,” making history as the first African-American to win in the category. Her costumes tell stories so intriguing and unforgettable they influence music, fashion, culture, and film-making: they help us to understand ourselves better. In a career spanning more than three decades in theater, cinema, and television, Carter has teamed up with some of the most prolific directors from Spike Lee, Steven Spielberg, Ava DuVernay, to Ryan Coogler. She has over forty film credits, including two Academy Award nominations for “MALCOLM X” (1993) and “AMISTAD” (1998), and an Emmy nomination for the reboot of the television mini-series “ROOTS” (2016). Carter became only the second Costume Designer, 60 years after the first, to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (2021). 

Carter is a member of the Board of Governors for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Foundation, and co-founder of the Mildred Blount Scholarship Fund, which was created to assist BIPOC costume designers. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Theater Arts from Hampton University, Hampton, Virginia and an Honorary Doctorate from Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts.

The in-person event is open to the UMass Amherst community, and a livestream will be open to the public.