A stage designer specialising in costume design, she was a graduate of the Clothing Design Department of the Łódź Art School. She was initially a designer at "Moda Polska" clothing company, working on many collections presented in Poland and abroad (all of Europe and Australia). She has designed for drama and opera theatres and for film. She has worked with directors including Bogdan Cybulski, Jan Englert, Eugeniusz Korin, Maciej Prus, Marek Weiss-Grzesiński, Janusz Wiśniewski and Krzysztof Zaleski.
She has designed costumes for close to 150 theatre productions, including Goldoni’s Squabbles at Chioggia, Wyspiański’s November Night, Mickiewicz’s Forefathers, Słowacki’s Father Marek, Horsztyński and Kordian, Krasiński’s Un-divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pericles and The Tempest, Gombrowicz’s Wedding and Operetta, Brecht / Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogonny, Janusz Wiśniewski’s Panopticum a la Madame Tussaud, The Sick Man’s Prayer Before Nightfall and End of Europe (Grand Prix and Critics’ Award at the BITEF Festival in Belgrade, Grand Prix in Nancy, awards in Amsterdam and Hannover), and also musicals: Bock / Stein’s Fiddler on the Roof, Sobol’s Ghetto, Kaczmarski / Satanowski’s The Jugglers and the Hanged, and Satanowski’s Decadance. Her work also included costumes for many opera and ballet productions, including Boris Godunov, The Gates of Paradise, The Queen of Spades, Faust, Macbeth, Mannequins, The Haunted Manor, The Rite of Spring, La Traviata, Il Trovatore, Swan Lake and many more. She has been working with Television Theatre for many years, where she has designed costumes for giant productions of Forefathers and Kordian, for example.
Her costume designs for Operetta received an award at the Polish Contemporary Theatre Festival (1980), and those for Un-divine Comedy at the Polish Classics Festival (1982). She was a teacher of costume design at the Scenography Department of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts for 10 years.
Irena Biegańska died on May 30th, 2005.
Photo: Archive
