CLINT RAMOS
CLINT RAMOS
Named one of Tatler Asia’s Asia’s Most Influential in both 2024 and 2025 and one of Variety’s 10 Broadway Stars to Watch, CLINT RAMOS is a creative director, producer, curator, designer, educator, and advocate whose practice moves across theatre, opera, film, visual culture, and institutional programming. His work pushes beyond traditional distinctions between artistic disciplines, bringing together artists, audiences, and forms to imagine new ways of making and experiencing culture.
He is the Artistic and Creative Director of Theatre Group Asia (TGA) in Manila, Philippines, where he leads the company’s artistic vision and programming with Executive Director Christopher Mohnani. TGA develops work rooted in Asia for local and international audiences while bringing major global theatrical works to the region through an Asian lens. Productions include Request Sa Radyo starring Lea Salonga and Dolly de Leon; A Chorus Line starring Conrad Ricamora; the Philippine premiere of Into the Woods starring Lea Salonga, Arielle Jacobs, and Josh Dela Cruz; and the international premiere of The Notebook. Theatre Group Asia is in residence at the Samsung Performing Arts Theater in Makati.
In New York, Ramos serves as Producing Creative Director of Encores! at New York City Center, where his work encompasses artistic development, producing, and the reimagining of canonical American musicals for contemporary audiences. His projects there have included Billy Porter’s revisal of The Life; The Light in the Piazza starring Ruthie Ann Miles and directed by Chay Yew; and Robert O’Hara’s productions of Jelly’s Last Jam and La Cage aux Folles, among others.
At Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Ramos is an Artist and Curator in Residence, Lead Curator of American Songbook, and Visual Director of Summer for the City. His work there brings together performance, music, design, visual culture, and public space, with a particular interest in expanding who gets to participate in and define major American cultural institutions. As Lead Curator of American Songbook, he has programmed artists and projects that question and expand the very idea of an “American songbook,” asking who gets included in the canon and how that canon continues to be written.
Ramos, with David Zinn, is also Co-Artistic Director of Springboard to Design, an initiative in residence at The New York Public Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center dedicated to expanding access to careers in theatrical design. Through intensive workshops, mentorship, and direct engagement with working professionals, Springboard introduces the next generation of artists to scenic, costume, lighting, sound, projection, and other areas of theatrical design and production, with a particular commitment to young people who have historically lacked access to the field.
He was a Lead Producer of the Broadway production of Here Lies Love, the groundbreaking all-Filipino Broadway musical by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, directed by Alex Timbers.
As a designer, Ramos has created more than 200 theatre, opera, dance, and film productions internationally. In 2023, he designed longtime collaborator Robert O’Hara’s landmark production of Anthony Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X at the Metropolitan Opera. His work for the Met also includes costume design for Tristan und Isolde.
Ramos received the Tony Award for Best Costume Design of a Play for Eclipsed, becoming the first person of color to win in that category. His additional Tony nominations include costume design for Maybe Happy Ending, The Rose Tattoo, Once on This Island, Torch Song, and KPOP, and scenic design for Slave Play.
His honors also include two Obie Awards, including one for Sustained Excellence in Design; three Lucille Lortel Awards; a Drama Desk Award; an Outer Critics Circle Award; two American Theatre Wing Henry Hewes Design Awards; the TDF/Irene Sharaff Young Master Award; a Helen Hayes Award; and a Craig Noel Award, among other honors. In the Philippines, he has twice received the Ani ng Dangal Presidential Award for dramatic arts.
Selected Broadway credits include Grand Horizons, Slave Play, The Rose Tattoo starring Marisa Tomei, Burn This starring Adam Driver and Keri Russell, Torch Song, Once on This Island, Six Degrees of Separation starring Allison Janney, Sunday in the Park with George starring Jake Gyllenhaal, In Transit, Eclipsed starring Lupita Nyong’o, Violet starring Sutton Foster, and The Elephant Man starring Bradley Cooper, which also transferred to the West End.
Other major credits include Here Lies Love in New York, Seattle, and at the National Theatre in London; Dry Powder starring Claire Danes and John Krasinski; Barbecue; The Good Person of Szechwan; Appropriate; Angels in America; Wild With Happy; and Bootycandy.
For seven seasons, Ramos served as principal costume designer for New York City Center’s Encores! Off-Center, designing productions including Runaways, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, The Wild Party starring Sutton Foster, Little Shop of Horrors starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Ellen Greene, A New Brain starring Jonathan Groff, The Cradle Will Rock, I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road, Randy Newman’s Faust, tick, tick...BOOM! starring Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Pump Boys and Dinettes.
His New York work has been seen extensively at The Public Theater, where he has designed more than 25 productions, as well as at New York Theatre Workshop, Roundabout Theatre Company, Lincoln Center Theater, Playwrights Horizons, Second Stage Theater, Signature Theatre, Classic Stage Company, Ma-Yi Theater Company, NAATCO, Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, WP Theater, Soho Playhouse, Mint Theater Company, Red Bull Theater, and Asia Society, among others.
His regional work includes productions at American Repertory Theater, Arena Stage, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, California Shakespeare Theater, Dallas Theater Center, Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Guthrie Theater, Huntington Theatre Company, La Jolla Playhouse, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and many others.
Internationally, his work has been seen at the National Theatre, the West End, and the Barbican in London; in Dublin, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Bucharest, and Manila; and at theatres and cultural institutions throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia.
His film work includes production design for Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and follows the life of an undocumented Filipina trans woman in New York, and costume design for Respect, the Aretha Franklin biopic starring Jennifer Hudson.
Education and mentorship have been central to Ramos’s practice. He served as Professor and Head of Design and Production at Fordham University until 2022. Previously, he was Professor and Head of Scenic Design at SUNY Purchase and has served as a visiting professor and artist at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Georgetown University. His work with Springboard to Design extends this commitment beyond the university, creating pathways into the profession for a new and more representative generation of theatre artists.
He serves on the American Theatre Wing Advisory Board and is a co-founder of Design Action, an organization created in response to the need for greater equity and accountability within the American theatre. His lifelong advocacy centers on creating a more equitable cultural landscape for artists of color, immigrants, and communities historically excluded from positions of artistic and institutional power.
Ramos holds an MFA from New York University, where he attended on the Gary Kalkin Memorial Scholarship.
Born and raised in Cebu, Philippines, he lives in New York City with his husband and daughter.
Clint Ramos practice is based on Lenapehoking, the traditional, ancestral, and unceded homeland of the Lenape people.