Born Hartford, Connecticut, 22 June 1937.
Died Cooperstown, New York, 24 June 2025.
American set and costume designer.
John Conklin had a long and successful international career as a designer of sets and costumes for the theatre, especially opera.
He trained at Yale, and in 1958 joined the Williamstown Theatre Festival, where he designed a production of Time Remembered (Jean Anouilh). He designed a number of Broadway productions from 1963, beginning with Tambourines to Glory (Langston Hughes). He also worked Off Broadway and with several theatres outside New York.
He began to design for opera with Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites at New York City Opera in 1966. From then on he worked for most of the major opera companies across the United States. These included Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, St Louis and Washington.
He was the associate artistic director at Glimmerglass (Cooperstown) between 1990 and 2008, before spending his final years as artistic advisor to Boston Lyric Opera. He continued to work at Glimmerglass right to the end, including designs for the 2025 summer season. He taught for many years at New York University and in 2011 received a National Endowment for the Arts opera award.
He also worked extensively in Europe, with productions in Amsterdam, Bologna, Glasgow, London, Munich and Stockholm.
In Scotland he designed Scottish Opera's first production of Werther, directed by Rhoda Levine in 1983. He also designed The Postman Always Rings Twice (Stephen Paulus 1982) for Opera Theatre of St Louis, which was brought to the 1983 Edinburgh Festival.
© Copyright Opera Scotland 2025
Site by SiteBuddha