Assistant Professor of Costume Design & Costume Department Director. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Abdiel Portalatín Pérez, MFA is a costume designer, draper/tailor, and practice-based researcher whose fifteen-year career began collaborating with theatre, dance, film, and live event companies across the island. His work investigates how dress functions as performance, technology, and cultural expression, with a particular focus on menswear tailoring, drag and queer aesthetics, and Latinx identity in costume design, a through line traceable to his MFA thesis, Latinx and Black Presence in the History of (Western) Fashion (2019). His recent research, Tailoring Drag Masculinity: Re-Cutting Billy Flynn in Pompeii (USITT, 2026), extends this inquiry into how tailoring itself becomes a site where gender, performance, and craft intersect.
He is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts in Costume Design & Technology and Costume Department Director at Utah Tech University, where he serves as resident costume designer and teaches through hands-on, process-driven mentorship, treating craft as both technical skill and cultural practice. His practice-based research on the world-premiere Gingerbread: A Musical Drama was presented at the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters (2026).
He holds an MFA in Costume Design & Technology from The Pennsylvania State University and a BA in Humanities/Drama from the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. His credits span opera, theatre, and dance, including San Francisco Opera, Washington National Opera, Sarasota Opera, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The Santa Fe Opera, Alonzo King LINES Ballet, and Detour Productions. He is founder of Sew Cuir, a bilingual sewing and patternmaking education initiative in San Francisco, California.