About
Brenda Allison Birkeland is a costume and wardrobe technician currently working towards her MFA in Costume Design and Production at The University of Alabama.
Brenda hails from the great state of New York, specifically from the Long Island area. She has had a love for stitching ever since her second grade teacher, Mrs. Mastroianni, taught her whole class to hand sew. She is the only one who stuck with it. She did not discover her love for costuming until her undergraduate years in New York City at Marymount Manhattan College, where she took one sewing class and from there was hired as a personal assistant to the costume coordinator for the Alvin Ailey School. Things spiraled from there and she wound up with a Bachelor's degree in Costume Design and Technical Production with several internships under her belt and a small role in a feature film. But that's another story.
After college, Brenda took a costuming internship at Walt Disney World, did freelance work in New York for a stretch, and completed two apprenticeships with The Santa Fe Opera. She also took continuing education courses at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology in millinery and leatherwork. After that, she moved to Alabama to pursue her MFA, and that's where she is now.
Brenda is also an award-winning, nationally published poet. She has a Shih Tzu named Lotus who is the light of her life. And she has a letter that Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote to her, which she will gladly tell you a four-part story about if you ask.
