Photographer: Mengwen Cao
Sueann Leung
is a New York-based costume designer and stylist with a keen interest in using design to explore identity and expression.
For Broadway, they have served on Santo Loquasto’s Tony Award-winning design team for Hello, Dolly! and had also been the Associate Costume Designer to Dede Ayite for the Tony Award-winning play Topdog/Underdog. They recently filmed the Netflix series American Primeval on location in Santa Fe as the Assistant Costume Designer to Virginia B. Johnson. Leung’s recent work has included a shift to film and TV – media that is changing more quickly to tell diverse stories, including those of queer people of color. They were the costume and wig designer for HBO APA Visionaries 2021 Finalist Little Sky, a queer Asian American coming of age drama about the power of chosen family, as well as Butterfly Lovers 永久徘徊, a live performance piece centering queer Asian diasporic love for The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with The W.O.W Project.
Their work also includes having costume designed the music video Care for You from Ohyung’s debut album Untitled (Chinese Man with Flame), Refinery29’s pilot Puffy, which focused on a woman of color and her journey towards self love and body positivity, and BKPI, a groundbreaking web-series with a creative team and cast of predominantly queer women of color, which premiered at LA Film Festival, Frameline, and Outfest.
Leung is a member of the Costume Designers Guild, I.A.T.S.E Local 829 and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Gender Studies from Mount Holyoke College, and this background continues to inform their work using costume design as a powerful tool to humanize and respectfully represent people – particularly those from marginalized groups, especially queer people of color.
Leung is currently developing a Queer Asian American Gender Nonbinary swimwear/resort fashion line.
