Delores Ringer

Delores Ringer is a scenographer and was a faculty member at KU from 1984 to 2014. She designed scenery and costumes for many productions, including the scenery for The Royal Family, scenery and costumes for The Cherry Orchard and The Three Sisters, and costumes for Tartuffe, Into the Woods, Anything Goes, and My Fair Lady.

Delores has advocated for plays by and about women over the years and has directed Our Country’s Good (2004); Fen (2000); The Gut Girls ('99); Between Pancho Via and a Naked Woman ('97); Variations on a Theme by Clara Schumann ('95); The Heidi Chronicles ('94); The Love of the Nightingale ('92); The Medea Myth ('90); an all-female production of Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona ('89); and Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi ('89). She also directed Jesse and the Bandit Queen and I Stand Before You Naked for the English Alternative Theatre, and Going to See the Elephant at the Lawrence Community Theatre.

Her production of The Love of the Nightingale was invited to participate in the American College Theatre Festival Region V in 1991. She has received special commendations for design and directing from ACTF over the years.

Delores has also designed for the American Heartland Theatre, the Nebraska Shakespeare Festival, The Utah Shakespeare Festival, and theatres and dance companies in Chicago and Portland, Oregon. She taught at Barat College, Lewis and Clark College, and Boise State University. She has an M.F.A. degree in theatre design from the Pennsylvania State University and a B.A. in drama from Hanover College.

Delores tought classes in scenography, costume design, scenic design, theatrical rendering, costume production, and Interactive and Forum Theatre. She established the Interactive Theatre Troupe at KU in 2010 as a way to foster difficult discussions between groups and individuals on campus and off.

She was honored to receive the KU Center for Teaching Excellence Graduate Mentor Award in 2009, and the Emily Taylor Women’s Resource Center Outstanding Woman Educator Award in 2004. In 2006 she was named the Kennedy Center Faculty Fellow in Costume Design at the Summer Design Intensive in Washington D.C.

She has studied with Augusto Boal, Ping Chong, Suzanne Lacey, Rachel Rosenthal, and in the summer of 2003 attended the LaMama International Directing Symposium at Spoletto, Italy.