Today we’d like to introduce you to Natalia Rumiantseva.
Hi Natalia, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I grew up in Russia and was always surrounded by art in many different forms. I sang in a touring choir, loved to draw, and was always creatively inclined, but I was told that a creative career would never pay the bills and that art was something I should keep as a hobby.
So, for a while, I listened. I spent five years working an office job and eventually found myself completely burned out and unhappy. At the time, I was watching a lot of television and dreaming about moving to the U.S., without really knowing what that life could look like for me.
Then I watched Ryan Murphy’s The Politician on Netflix and became fascinated by the visual world of the show. For the first time, it really hit me that there were people whose actual job was to create what actors wear on screen. It sounds like such a simple realization now, but at the time it completely changed the direction of my life.
I found friends who were styling commercials and started joining them on set. Once I experienced that environment firsthand, I knew I wanted to do it professionally. That pushed me to apply to fashion schools, and eventually I was accepted to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and moved to the U.S.
At FIT, I studied fashion design, but I always knew costumes were the goal. I learned how to sew, drape, make patterns, and design, took as many art classes as I could, and completed a minor in film. I also interned with Eric Winterling, whose studio builds costumes for Broadway productions, which gave me an opportunity to see costume construction at an incredibly high professional level.
After earning my AAS, I moved to Los Angeles hoping to pursue a career in film. My timing was somewhat unfortunate, the industry was going through strikes, and finding work in film was extremely difficult. So I went back to school, this time to study costume design at the LACC Theatre Academy.
Ironically, what initially felt like a detour ended up opening an entirely new world for me. At LACC, I rediscovered theater and completely fell in love with it.
Costume design for theater and film is still my main area of expertise, but since moving to LA, I’ve allowed myself to explore much more. I’ve worked with props and scenic design, tried acting, and most recently co-created an original musical called MILCH for the Hollywood Fringe Festival, which I wrote, co-directed, produced, and co-designed.
Creating MILCH expanded my understanding of what it means to make art more than almost anything I had done before. It forced me to look beyond my own department and understand how all the pieces of a production come together to create one world. More importantly, it gave me a desire to keep exploring.
For a long time, I thought I had to choose one creative profession and become that one thing. Now, I’m much more interested in seeing where each new form of storytelling can take me.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Most definitely not.
For the longest time, my biggest struggle was actually allowing myself to create. I had this constant urge to make things, but I was also afraid, ashamed, and deeply insecure about putting any of it into the world. I would draw little doodles in my notebooks and simultaneously tell myself that I had no talent. What I didn’t realize at the time was how much I was learning simply by being obsessed with art. Every night at the theater, every museum visit, every film I watched, every image that stayed with me. I was developing my eye and my taste long before I had enough confidence to call myself an artist.
Moving to the U.S. was an enormous challenge on its own, and in many ways it still is. I had to build a life from scratch in a different country, and I’m still navigating the uncertainty of visas and immigration documents while trying to build a career at the same time.
There were also things I carried with me that had nothing to do with my career. I’ve had to confront a lot of trauma and demons from my past while continuing to move forward. At the same time, I’ve spent countless hours (and more sleepless nights than I can count) developing my craft. There were periods when there simply weren’t enough hours in the day for everything that needed to be done between school, work, and the projects I had taken on, so sleep was often the thing that had to give. Whether it was sewing, drawing, designing, or trying to find my own voice through writing and speaking, a lot of what I know today was learned through those long nights of doing the work.
There have been so many days when I genuinely felt like I knew nothing and couldn’t create anything worthwhile. Strangely, I’m beginning to understand that those periods of doubt and struggle have also made my work more honest. The more I’ve allowed myself to actually experience life instead of trying to be perfect at it, the more I’ve had to say through my art.
I’ve lost friendships and broken many connections along the way. Some of that has been painful, but it has also made room for me to discover my people. I’ve found incredible friends, collaborators, and mentors who have changed the way I see both my work and myself.
I don’t think the struggle is something that happened on the way to becoming an artist and then ended. A lot of it has been the process of becoming one, learning to trust my own ideas, developing the skills to express them, and slowly letting go of the shame that once made me afraid to create at all.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
My primary area of expertise is costume design for theater and film. I love building characters through clothing and using costume to communicate things that may never be said out loud—someone’s background, status, insecurities, desires, or the way they want the world to perceive them.
Because I originally studied fashion design, I have a strong technical foundation behind my work. I can sew, drape, make patterns, illustrate, alter and construct garments, so when I design something, I’m also thinking about how it can actually be made and how it will function on a real body and in performance. At the same time, my background in film and my experience in other areas of theater have taught me to think about costume as only one piece of a much larger visual world.
I think that is also what sets me apart. I’m very curious, and I don’t like staying inside the boundaries of one department. Every time I step into another discipline, I come back to costume with a better understanding of storytelling as a whole.
I’m probably most proud of MILCH, an original musical I co-created for the Hollywood Fringe Festival. I wrote, co-directed, produced and co-designed the show, and it was the first time I had to think about a production from so many different perspectives at once. It pushed me far outside of the role I had originally imagined for myself and showed me that I’m capable of creating not just costumes, but entire worlds and stories.
I love beauty and spectacle, but I don’t think they have to exist just for decoration. I’m drawn to humor, absurdity, uncomfortable subjects, complicated characters, and stories that have something underneath the surface.
I spent a long time thinking that being interested in too many things meant I wasn’t focused enough. Now I see it differently. Costume design is my craft and the foundation of what I do, but my curiosity about everything around it is one of my greatest strengths. I don’t just want to dress the character, I want to understand the world they live in and help build it.
Can you tell us more about what you were like growing up?
Growing up, I was very shy and quiet. I spent a lot of time alone, thinking and observing. I’ve always been a deep thinker, and I can spend countless hours analyzing myself, my behavior, other people, and trying to understand why we do the things we do.
I also grew up with a strong sense that whatever you do, you should do it extremely well. I became a perfectionist very early, but I think there is a positive side to that too: I love challenging myself and trying to jump higher than I think I’m capable of. I’m incredibly ambitious and stubborn, and once I truly decide that I want something, it is very difficult to convince me to give up.
People often perceive me as quiet and calm, which is funny because internally I feel almost the opposite. A lot of the time I feel like a fountain of emotions, thoughts, ideas and feelings. They constantly push me toward new experiences and into territories where I’m not entirely comfortable yet.
I think I’m an explorer by nature. I often feel a little like a nomad, running with the wind and constantly changing direction when something new catches my curiosity. Routine has never come naturally to me, although I’ve grown to appreciate it more recently. What really makes me happy is discovering something I’ve never seen before, learning how something works, or getting access to a world I normally wouldn’t get to experience.
That’s actually one of the things that attracted me to film and theater. You get to live hundreds of different lives without necessarily living them yourself. I remember working on a film about pilots, and one day we were shooting at an airport with an actual airplane as one of our props. I was ridiculously happy just because I got to see the backside of an airport and discover how everything worked behind the scenes. On another project it might be a completely different world.
I think that curiosity has been there since I was a child. I may have been the quiet kid sitting somewhere by herself, but internally I was always exploring something.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://rumiantseva.myportfolio.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nataliatheexplorer
