Classes, How-to, Portfolio Advice

Information on Costume (& other Theatre Tech) Portfolios/Job Seeking

Putting Personality in Your Portfolio & Resume the respectable sounding title TD&T put on my how-to on the topic: Stroking Your Own Ego to Get Jobs is my broad general advice on this topic. Both versions of this cheery screed have their strong points, as well as different bits of my old portfolios. However, there are a lot of specifics I can send your way as well:

My own current web portfolio of course is this website, taramaginnis.com

It costs me a low amount of money to operate annually, but hundreds of hours total to make, update and repair, done in little fits and starts of just a few hours or days every six months or so. You need to start your portfolio soon, and work on it whenever you create work on a new show or project (or have time to mess with it) to insert it in as an update.

If you poke around this site you will find it also links to some PDF portfolios I post at Issuu. Some employers want PDFs, so having them already posted online is useful.

You will also find l link to some of my mini individual show portfolios at Shutterfly,

and to video content at my YouTube Channel.

These last three (Issuu, Shutterfly and YouTube) cost me nothing at all to operate, though they also take time. So you have many available formats for displaying your portfolio materials online, may of them free to use. Having good material on multiple platforms that can interconnect gives you more exposure and more options of ways to show off your work.

I also built a Makeup Portfolio site on Google Sites to be able to train students how to make a site in that free format:

If you are/were a student at DVC and are looking for images from shows you have worked on, or past classes with me that you have done since 2009 I also encourage you to both go to DVC Drama Photo Archive and Portfolio/Resume Advice a multi year project where I have been uploading photos of past shows at DVC (for use in student portfolios) and advice on how to make different types of them.

You can also join Shutterfly for free so you can download pictures from my TaraMaginnisClasses Shutterfly Share Site for use in your portfolio. (This is actually the main point of this photo share site, so you do not need to ask for my individual permission).

Free Techie/Designer Resume Template (MS Word.doc). This is a great sample resume template for beginning designers and other Theatre Tech emphasis people, created by Kade Mendelowitz , the TD/LD of UAF who is a former colleague of mine. You can download the file and open it in your word processing program to use it. 

Here are some very clear simple basic portfolio how-tos to start you off if you really have no idea what a portfolio is or what to do:

Screen Skills: Build Your Costume Portfolio

How to make a costume design portfolio

In 1975 a Commission of USITT (United States Institute of Theatre Technology) generated a basic text document of Standards of Student Portfolios for all areas of Design/Tech, which tells you what most schools expected of students at different levels as far as physical portfolios around that time. As these guidelines still do apply for print versions to a great extent, this old document was digitized many years later to a PDF and posted because these basics are still in use. USITT currently also does Portfolio Reviews at their annual convention to help students get feedback and improve their hard copy portfolios before they do job interviews.

This shows an annual portfolio review done by a university theatre department for their students:

USITT also has extensive resume advice for technical theatre resumes:

If you do know what one is, and have seen several and are now looking for more guidance, there is much more detailed advice on the Paper Hard Copy Portfolio of a Costumer, as well as the truly excellent Costume Portfolio Website & Blog of freelance costumer Christianne Bakewell, who authored this really excellent portfolio tutorial.

These YouTube Playlists I have made can also help you depending on which type of Costume/Tech/Design portfolio you want to make:

The single thing that helps most with your portfolio is taking lots of pictures and then sorting and organizing them by topic so you can find the ones you need. After that it is just labeling. So if you have access to any stuff you have made, photograph it NOW, and start organizing. Two tutorials I’ve done on how to do this are here:

Photographing Your Costumes For Your Portfolio & Publication Photographing Your Makeup at Home

Free portfolio hosting sites have a variety of styles of presentation that you may prefer, so poking around these places may have you find a free option that suits your aesthetic needs:

If you like WordPress (the free software platform that is used to build this “blog” format site) you might try one of the 11 Free WordPress Hosting Services That Don’t Suck (2020) and start building a portfolio in this format.