Caitlin Mawhinney is a Yorkshire born and bred Set and Costume designer, working out of her studio in East London. After graduating from Nottingham Trent University with a First in (BA) Theatre Design, she was the winner of the Evening Standard Future Theatre Fund in 2021, and has continued to gain recognition with a double-nomination for Best Designer at The Stage Debut Awards, finalist for the JMK Awards as well as being a Creative Associate at Jermyn Street Theatre and a Resident Designer at New Diorama Broadgate. Her work as a set and costume designer has seen main stages, studios and unconventional spaces across the country. Recent collaborations include National Theatre Public Acts, Hull Truck Theatre, Leeds Playhouse, Soho Theatre, Arcola Theatre, Northern Opera, Southbank Center alongside many others. She loves to design for shows with a social and political motivation, using her designs to walk a line between reality and abstraction. Alongside this, Caitlin’s work takes the form of installation design, most notably for the National Trust, and as Associate and Assistant to a number of designers including for the West End, Scottish Opera, Royal Opera House and National Theatre. Caitlin enjoys facilitating creative workshops for people of all ages and aims to create work experience opportunities for designers in education.

I became aware of the extent of the climate crisis during my university years, when I took a personal pledge to stop buying clothes from fast fashion - something that has now lasted 6 years! And became more aware of my general day to day sustainability.

This means within my own design practice I carry a certain level of sustainability that I already apply to my own life. I am still working out how this works for me in the face of larger scale work and keeping up momentum for enhancing sustainability alongside trying to live and build a career in general. I have kept up a general level of interest in conversations and workshops but ,now that I am more comfortable and established in my career as a designer, I would like to be more purposeful with what this means for my practice and how I can bring sustainability into rooms where it isn't already. I commit to being perfectly imperfect.