Joseph Dodd, M.F.A., the Illustrator for Calabash Books, is a professor and the Director of Design for the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he also received his M.F.A. in Theatre with a concentration in scenic design, an emphasis in Asian Theatre and an unofficial minor in creative procrastination.
He has lived and worked in Hawaii since 1975, with a brief absence when he taught at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, CO, and Pomona College of the Claremont Colleges in Claremont, CA.
Mr. Dodd's set and costume designs have appeared on the cover of numerous books and journals and for several years he designed the windows for Tiffany & Co. in Honolulu. His design students have consistently placed in the top ranks of Walt Disney Imagineering Competitions held at universities nationwide. In Hawaii Mr. Dodd has designed for almost every theatre group, but has a special fondness for the productions of the Honolulu Theatre for Youth. On the regional theatre circuit, he has designed for the Tony Award-winning Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis, MN, as well as the Syracuse Stage, Alliance Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Seattle Children's Theatre, Lincoln Center Institute, Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Denver Center Theatre Company and the Fulton Opera House, Trollwood Performing Arts School in Fargo, ND. Internationally, his designs for the stage have been seen at theatres in China, Russia, Scotland, Micronesia, Saipan and the Philippines. His napkin doodles have been seen at establishments around the world.
Mr. Dodd grew up on tinker toys, erector sets, Marvel Comics, and plastic models of all kinds. His earliest drawings were rendered on the inside covers of his elementary school textbooks and then he went on to win top prize in a second grade fire prevention poster contest. For a prize he got to ride a fire truck to school wearing a fireman's helmet. Mr. Dodd began his undergraduate studies in graphic art but ended up in theatre design as a graduate student where he met is lovely wife, Madeline.
Mr. Dodd is also an avid adventure traveler, hiker and sea kayaker. He has been thrown from a horse in Mongolia, kayaked with killer whales off the coast of Canada, eaten stir-fried bumble bee larva at the Great Wall of China, shared reindeer milk with Siberian reindeer people, stepped in purple bear poop in Alaska, charmed snakes in Morocco, dressed with leaves in the Marshall Islands, sung bad Karaoke in Micronesia, stomped grapes along the Camino de Santiago in Spain, been dumped from a white-water raft in northern Italy, collected toilet paper samples in the former Soviet Republics, rappelled down a waterfall system in Austria with a German soccer team, ziplined through the trees in Mexico, slept in a stilt house in Vietnam, scooped poop for his dog sled team in northern Minnesota and danced wildly in the streets of Manila with a gorilla. He survives dangerous encounters with potentially bad people on his adventures by drawing cartoons for them.
Kraken-ka, The Komodo Dragon, A Tale of Indonesia, his first children's book, won the honorable mention award for Excellence in Children's Illustrative Books from the Hawaii Book Publishing Association in 2008. Since then he has illustrated two more beautiful children's books in the Ring of Fire series: TiQri, The Little Snow Fox, A Tale of the North Pacific, and When the Cassowary Pooped, A Tale of New Guinea. Mr. Dodd's creative performing arts materials included on discs accompanying two of the books and on this website continue to delight children around the world.
|
