Loyce Arthur, MFA, BA

Associate Professor Emeritus
Biography

After 25 years as teaching design, Loyce Arthur savors her final production in the Department of Theatre Arts

Loyce is an Associate Professor of Design Emeritus. She taught in the Department of Theatre Arts from 1998 to 2024.

Loyce designed costumes for numerous productions including the US premiere of Peter Pan & Wendy at the Prince Music Theater, Philadelphia; Langston Hughes’ Black Nativity, which won a special OBIE award; Box Office of the Damned at the Classic Stage Company Theatre, New York, and The Brothers Sun and Moon at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C. She designed Peer Gynt and The 39 Steps at Portland Stage Company, Portland, Maine and Black Pearl Sings! at Interact Theater Company, Philadelphia, which won the 2010 Brown Martin Philadelphia Award, Barrymore Awards.

Her design work at University of Iowa included Welcome to Thebes, The Tattoo Girl14, Reefer Madness, The Magic Flute, The Learned Ladies, and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. In 2004 Loyce designed costumes and masks for Shadows of the Reef with distinguished theatre artist Anton Juan and then was invited by Juan to design costumes for Nocturnal Wanderer and Brokenville in Athens, Greece in 2005. From 2006-2010 she was a guest artist at Mahogany Mas Camp in the United Kingdom working with award winning Carnival designer Clary Salandy.

Research Awards include an Old Gold Award to study mask making with Donato Satori in Italy and a West African Research Association fellowship to study ritual and performance in Ghana. Other research grants have broadened her knowledge of Balinese mask traditions, East Indian Kutiyattam and Kathakali theatre forms and West African Research traditional arts and performance. In 2004 she presented her work on Trinidad Carnival at a symposium in Santiago de Cuba and she has researched carnival traditions in the UK, Toronto Canada, Rio de Janeiro Brazil, the Netherlands, Trinidad, and around the world. She was co-director of the 2001 National Theatre Mask Conference, the first of its kind ever held in the United States. Loyce is currently on the executive board of the Iowa Center for Human Rights. She is also Co-Director of the Caribbean Diaspora and Atlantic Studies Program and coordinated a Caribbean Carnival community arts project and exhibit of Carnival costumes in partnership with the University of Iowa Museum of Art and Hancher Auditorium.

Portrait of Loyce Arthur, MFA
Education
MFA, New York University
BA, University of Pennsylvania