Susanna Suurla

Susanna Suurla (MA) is a costume designer and performance maker with over 20 years of professional experience in the performing arts. Throughout her career, she has worked as a costume designer and maker, prop maker, video artist, spatial designer, performer, and backstage worker. She has designed costumes for contemporary dance, ballet and circus, revues,  site-specific performance, theatre,  children’s plays and more—her research and artistic interests centre on materially informed creative processes and body-awareness-based performance-making practices. Since 2019, she has also been teaching costume design at Aalto University. 
 
Currently, Suurla works as a doctoral researcher in the ‘Embodied Experience of Costume’ research project (2022-24, 2025-26, PI Sofia Pantouvaki) at Aalto University. Her practice-led artistic research explores the enriching potential of materially oriented, embodied, and reflective devising methods in the field of costume design. The research contributes to the growing recognition of devised, process-oriented methods in performance-making, offering pedagogical tools and new insights for costume design in devised performance.