about
Miguel Romero was born in Cuba and earned his BFA in Scenic Design from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He began his career assisting Ming Cho Lee on productions for the New York Shakespeare Festival and at the Metropolitan Opera. He joined the faculty of the Theater Department of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1993 and became full professor seven years later. All of his courses — scenic design, history of architecture and décor, scene painting, and puppetry —focus on visual storytelling.
Earlier in his career, he designed for New York-based companies including The Public Theater, Roundabout Theatre Company and Playwrights Horizons, and also extensively for opera and ballet productions, including:
- Don Giovanni for the Santa Fe Opera
- Thea Musgrave’s Mary Queen of Scots at New York City Opera, San Francisco Opera and Virginia Opera
- Musgrave’s A Christmas Carol for the Royal Opera House / Sadler’s Wells and Virginia Opera
- La Belle Hélène for Opera Theatre of St. Louis
- Tosca for the New York City Opera National Company
- Don Giovanni for Florida Grand Opera
- Don Pasquale, Macbeth, La Bohème and Carmen for Central City Opera
- Der Rosenkavalier, Die Fledermaus and Elixir of Love for Los Angeles Opera Theatre
- The Rake’s Progress and Siegfried Matthus’ Cornet Christoph Rilke’s Song of Love and Death for Manhattan School of Music
- Cinderella, Renard, L’Histoire de Babar and Peter and the Wolf for Metropolitan Opera Ballet
- La Dama de las Camélias for the National Ballet of Chile.
His work was represented in the Silver Award-winning U.S. exhibit at the 1991 Prague Quadrennial. He has also been exhibited at the Ballard Puppetry Museum at the University of Connecticut, the Robert Tobin Collection at the Marion Kugler McNay Museum in San Antonio, and Touchstone Gallery in New York City.
In addition to designing numerous UMass productions such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Our Country’s Good, Venus, Peter Pan, Arms and The Man, Hell in High Water, The Merchant of Venice, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Angels in America – Millenium Approaches, Curse of the Starving Class, Romeo and Juliet, The Hungry Woman, and Marivaux’s Love in Disguise, he has been a frequent guest scenic designer at Williams College. Regional theater productions include Richard III for Shakespeare and Company; Kiss Me, Kate for GeVa Theatre; A Christmas Carol for City Stage; Jitta’s Atonement and Four of a Kind for Berkshire Theatre Festival; and South Pacific for Barrington Stage Company.
Prof. Romero’s work in film and television includes staff design contributions and camera scenic artist on Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Jonathan Demme’s Married to the Mob, and Scorsese’s Life Lessons segment of New York Stories.
Long a champion of the art of puppetry, he directed and co-authored Archipelago of Delight, a musical with puppetry, at UMass. Other puppet productions include Drums and Shadows, Boy In A Barrel, Curiosity, and Solstice, which were collaborations with his students and colleagues. A contributor to The Puppetry Journal, Prof. Romero is active in American and international puppetry organizations, including the National Puppetry Conferences at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Sandglass Theater’s Puppets in the Green Mountains, and the Institute International de la Marionnette. Sabbatical Journey, his account of studying puppetry and mask making in Japan and Indonesia, can be seen here.
Miguel Romero is one of six American designer-educators featured in “The Designer as Thinker,” a panel discussion published in American Theatre (January 2003).