I am Nadina Cojocaru and I am an artist and a costume designer. I have been studying arts through my entire life from classical piano, dance and drawing. I graduated from the University of Arts in Chisinau Moldova with a bachelor in choreography.
In 2010 I moved to Japan, a country I am fascinated with both in its country and culture. I lived there for 6 years where I intensively studied the Japanese language, culture and traditional Kimono dressing. In Japan I worked in fields related to the fashion industry; as a creative director for wedding fashion shows, designing and tailoring of wedding dresses, photography, make-up and hair styling. For the last 2 years of living there I had a great experience working for a big Japanese company, textile manufacturer, where my job was to work and collaborate with designers from high fashion brands from Europe, Asia and USA.
After meeting Jiří Bubeníček in 2016 I moved back to Europe to collaborate in different artistic projects with him. I designed the costumes for a number of his ballets, “Chapeau” for Nürenberg State Ballet in 2017, “Metropolis” for the Croatian National Ballet in Zagreb in 2018, “Processen” for the Royal Swedish Ballet in 2019, “Cinderella” for the Nuovo Balleto di Toscana in 2019, online video project “Tanzgedichte aus der Stille” in Dresden and Saxony in 2021–22, “Romeo and Juliet” for Croatian National Ballet Ivan pl. Zajc in Rijeka, in 2022, “Spartacus” for the Croatian National Ballet in Zagreb in 2023, “Bolero” for the opening gala of Festival Krumlov 2023.
To design costumes for ballet is about making all the characters memorable for the audience. The message of the characters have to appear in the costume. I love to explore the limits of what is possible in my designs, and often try to combine the contemporary with the historic. I want each character to be special and the costumes to communicate my ideas to the audience. It is like having a parallel story that goes hand in hand with the choreography and with the dramaturgy of the piece.