Sara Ryung Clement
on finding joy in purpose

Award-winning theater set designer Sara Ryung Clement grew up in Hastings, Minnesota, and her latest project is Go, Dog. Go! Ve Perro ¡Ve!, a bilingual musical running until Feb. 22 at the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis.

Sara Ryung Clement, an award-winning theater set designer and assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, believes in the alchemy of joy, what she calls a “deeply enjoyed sense of purpose.”

It’s how a Korean American girl growing up in Hastings, a small Minnesota city of fewer than 15,000 people at the time, discovered the world of art could be part of a conversation about identity and community.

There were few Asian Americans role models in media and the arts when she was growing up. To her, that meant feeling unburdened by expectation. “In retrospect, I learned the lesson early to figure out what makes sense for you,” she said.

Her first love was literature. In first grade, her goal was to be a writer and illustrator, passions that would become the early seeds of visual acuity and storytelling she would use later in her professional career.

In a full-circle moment, her most recent production is the children’s musical, Go, Dog. Go! Ve Perro ¡Ve!, being staged until Feb. 22 at the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis. The bold sets help tell the bilingual musical of six dogs based on the iconic 1961 book, Go, Dog, Go!, by P.D. Eastman.

A vivid book that comes to life: Clement’s sets for Go, Dog. Go! Ve Perro ¡Ve! at the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis are bursting with color and playfulness befitting such characters as Green Dog, Red Dog, Blue Dog, Yellow Dog, MC Dog, and Spotted Dog.

Clement credits her parents – her mother was a physical therapist and her father was a chemical engineer – for giving her the freedom to blaze her own trail. She gave them art and they were amazed.

“I was fortunate to have parents who really supportive regardless of what I wanted to pursue,” she said. “I was always had a strong will and benefited from a robust support system.”

She said she found things in life “fairly early that I really enjoyed and loved, drama group or Spanish club or band or chorus that gave you an activity” and that those things gave her a sense of identity.

“I do remember things feeling distinctly more vivid and brighter starting in middle school – activities, things you do that you could love and could also be part of how you meet people, and how people identify you,” she said.

By the time she was in high school, the honors student knew she wanted to pursue creative writing at Princeton University in New Jersey. It was there, pursuing her Bachelor of Arts degree, that she took a class with Christine Jones, a Tony-award-winning set designer, and connected with set and costume design.

“It wasn’t a quixotic pursuit, but something you could do professionally and make a living,” she said.

After graduation, she spent a year in South Korea as a Fulbright Fellow, teaching English at an all-boys school and learning new things about herself. “You do start to realize within a homogenous culture that you might be able to achieve the beauty ideal,” she said.

In Drama School: Clement shown during her second year studio at Yale school of Drama

When she returned to the United States, she earned an MFA from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, in 2005.

She said one of her early moments realizing her voice had power was when she worked in Oregon on the production Vietgone, a play by Qui Nguyen about two Vietnamese refugees in Arkansas set after the fall of Saigon, with an entirely Asian American cast and primarily Asian American production team.

“We were telling a story in a different way,” she said. “It’s been a decade since we did that show and the power of seeing Asian Americans … people still come up to me. Younger audiences see themselves on stage. It was powerful for audiences and powerful for me.”

Over the years, she has racked up design credits all over the country, including Second Stage Uptown, Ma-Yi, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, South Coast Repertory, the Guthrie, Geffen Playhouse, East West Players, The Theatre @ Boston Court, TheatreWorks, Cornerstone Theater Company, Denver Center Theatre Company, Seattle Rep, Pasadena Playhouse, and others. She has designed sets and costumes for numerous world premieres, including Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House Part 2, Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band, and Jiehae Park’s Hannah and the Dread Gazebo.

She was a visiting assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University from 2011 to 2013. Before moving to Minneapolis in 2024 to be closer to family, she was based in Los Angeles and was part of the set design faculty at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.

She offers this advice to young people is: “Trust your gut. If there is something that is compelling you, give yourself space to pursue it.”

In Oregon: Rosa Joshi, director, producer and educator who serves as Associate Artistic Director of Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Clement at Oregon Shakespeare Festival Tech in 2020

In Boston: Madama Butterfly in process
for Boston Lyric Opera in 2023. You can see more of Sara Ryung Clement’s work here.