Mallory Prucha is an Associate Professor of Costume Design and Technology at Texas Tech University’s School of Theatre & Dance, where she also serves as Head of the Design, Technology, and Management (DTM) area and Coordinator of Strategic Initiatives and Planning for the J.T. & Margaret Talkington College of Visual & Performing Arts. Her work spans academic leadership, interdisciplinary research, and creative practice at institutional, regional, and national levels.

A multi-faceted fine artist and designer, Prucha is a member of United Scenic Artists, Local 829 (IATSE) and serves as National Vice Chair for Design, Technology, and Management for the American College Theater Festival (KCACTF). She is also a certified composite sketch artist for law enforcement through Stuart Parks Forensic Associates, providing forensic art services to the Lubbock Police Department on an as-needed basis.

Prucha’s creative and research practice bridges traditional fine arts, performance design, and applied arts in civic and institutional contexts. Her research agenda centers on the use of arts-based methodologies to augment training efficacy in non-traditional environments, including first response, medical education, behavioral health, and disaster-relief simulation. She is the creator and program lead of ARCANE (Artificial Realities, Contexts & Narrative Enactments), a multi-year simulation ecosystem integrating narrative design, standardized patient performance, moulage, and interdisciplinary collaboration. The foundation of this work is world building and is anchored by her strategic planning model, called FRACTALS, which is part of a larger effort to uplift the arts towards STEAM, to empower the arts in future contexts.

Through sustained partnerships with Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, the Texas Tech School of Veterinary Medicine, and the City of Lubbock, her work has contributed to the training of thousands of future service providers across health, emergency response, and public-service sectors. Her leadership in arts-integrated simulation and engaged scholarship has been recognized with the Texas Tech Presidential Award for Excellence in Engaged Creative Activity and the Texas Tech Chancellor’s Award for Research Excellence.

In addition to her applied research, Prucha maintains an active professional design and fine art practice. She has worked for more than a decade in professional theatre and performance with organizations including Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theatre, Oregon Cabaret Theatre, Nebraska Shakespeare, Nebraska Repertory Theatre, Black Hills Playhouse, Southwest Shakespeare Company, Bilkent University (Turkey), and Centro Nacional de las Artes (CENART) in Mexico City. Her professional roles have included Costume Designer, Cutter/Draper, Craftsperson, Dramaturg, Make-Up Artist, Scenic Charge Artist, and consultant.

Prucha is also a nationally recognized public and street-painting artist, specializing in large-scale sidewalk chalk murals that emphasize accessibility, community engagement, and place-based making. Her work includes numerous commissioned and award-winning public artworks. She is additionally a medallic artist, having won the Westminster Mint International “Green Coin” Design Competition, and she designed the KCACTF Gold Medallion, the organization’s highest honor—an award she was herself later presented in recognition of her contributions as both an artist and educator. Her publishing and illustration work includes illustrating multiple volumes of poetry and literary texts, as well as contributing visual work to theatrical and academic publications.

Prucha holds an MFA in Costume Design from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film, an MA in Theatre Arts, and a BA in Studio Art from the University of Nebraska–Omaha. She has previously taught at California State University, Chico; Mesa Community College; the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire; and Iowa Western Community College.

Leadership Philosophy: Socks in the Sock Box
Culture as Structure | Production as Pedagogy | Excellence with Care
Socks in the sock box. It is one of the simplest rules in costume design and one of the most revealing.

When socks are returned to the sock box, the system holds. When they are not, the system frays. Performers are late, dressers scramble, trust erodes, and the invisible labor that supports the work becomes visible for all the wrong reasons. What looks like a small organizational lapse is, in fact, a lesson about interdependence, accountability, and care.
I came to leadership through costume design, a discipline that lives at the intersection of artistic vision, logistics, and human systems. Costume design is not only about aesthetics; it is about bodies in motion, time, labor, budgets, maintenance, communication, and trust. It requires fluency across multiple systems at once: creative, technical, organizational, and relational. At its core, it relies on structure, not to constrain creativity, but to make it possible. That understanding shapes my leadership philosophy.
I believe that culture is a form of structure. Artistic excellence does not emerge by chance; it is cultivated through intentionally designed environments where values are translated into clear expectations, disciplined creative practice, and shared accountability. In conservatory education, culture must be actively shaped through curriculum, production planning, policy, assessment, and daily interaction so that students and faculty experience coherence rather than contradiction.
I lead through values-aligned systems design. My strategic planning approach begins with shared values and connects them through a guided framework that aligns mission, curriculum, production, assessment, and operations. This ensures that decisions are not reactive or siloed, but mutually reinforcing. When values guide structure, culture becomes legible, equitable, and sustainable, supporting both high standards and human well-being.
I view production as pedagogy, even in an organizational context. Well-structured production seasons are among the most powerful teaching tools a culture can lean into. When offerings are intentionally sequenced, responsibly scaled, and aligned with audiences, they teach professionalism, collaboration, ethical labor practices, and creative accountability, while protecting the space needed to take artistic risks and grow- and ask bigger questions of ourselves. Excellence in production is a metaphor for complex creative systems functioning at the highest level- or highest good..
My leadership is inherently collaborative and interdisciplinary. As a fully fluent artist across performance, design, technology, and production, I speak the languages of all disciplines. This fluency allows me to build trust, facilitate productive discourse, and create shared understanding across areas that often operate in isolation. Leadership in the arts must be relational, visible, and engaged with the daily rhythms of creative work; it cannot be effective from a distance. World-building, in particular, has served as a powerful pedagogical and inspiration in my work. When refined through the discipline of training, it teaches systems thinking, dramaturgical clarity, ethical authorship, and collaborative execution, how individual choices affect collective outcomes, how environments are constructed, maintained, and transformed. These are not abstract skills; they are the very capacities all need to thrive in complex creative ecosystems capable of empowering the future.
Finally, my leadership is grounded in care, clarity, and follow-through. I believe in honest mentorship, transparent communication, and holding both people and systems accountable with integrity. Excellence is not achieved through pressure alone; it is sustained when individuals feel supported by structure, respected in their labor, and invested in a shared purpose. In the end, leadership is not so different from costume design. If the socks are in the sock box, the show can go on.
And everyone—artists, technicians, students, faculty—can do their best work.

Teaching Philosophy
Experimentation as Practice | Art as Wisdom | Play as Intelligence | Relationship as Structure

I teach from the belief that art is a form of wisdom, distinct from information or technical knowledge, though both are necessary to reinforce depth of learning. Knowledge can be transmitted; wisdom must be embodied, practiced, and lived. Long before formal disciplines existed, humans made marks, sounds, rhythms, images, and rituals to understand themselves and the world around them. Ancient mark-making, music-making, and play were not decorative acts; they were humanity’s earliest research methods. Art remains one of our most enduring ways of asking fundamental questions about existence, relationship, care, power, and meaning.
In this sense, art is a language equal to science, philosophy, and technology in its capacity to speak to the core of the human condition. Where science seeks explanation, art seeks understanding. Where data describes, art integrates. My teaching is grounded in this lineage: from the first charcoal marks on cave walls to contemporary performance, design, and simulation practices that help us navigate complexity today.
At the core of my pedagogy is experimentation as practice. I do not treat experimentation as a preliminary phase before “real” work begins; experimentation is the work. Through iterative making, rehearsal, testing, failure, revision, and reflection, students learn how to think through materials, systems, and relationships. This process mirrors both ancient creative practice and contemporary scientific inquiry; where hypotheses are embodied, tested, refined, and sometimes discarded in favor of deeper understanding.
I view practice as pedagogy. In design-based education, learning happens most powerfully when ideas are embodied and tested through making and relationship building through compositional experimentation. Production, rehearsal, music-making, and applied projects are not extracurricular to learning; they are central to it. When practice is intentionally structured, sequenced developmentally, scaled responsibly, and aligned with learning outcomes, it teaches professionalism, collaboration, ethical labor practices, and creative accountability, while protecting the space students need to take meaningful risks and grow.
Play is central to this process. Play is not the opposite of rigor; it is one of its most sophisticated forms. Play allows for curiosity without immediate consequence, exploration without fear, and discovery without premature closure. In my teaching, play functions as a method for inquiry; an entry point into complexity that invites experimentation, humor, irony, discovery, and wonder. Music-making, improvisation, material exploration, and performative trial all create conditions where students can access intuition alongside analysis, emotion alongside structure.
My pedagogy is also deeply relational. Relationships and collaboration are the medium of learning, not a secondary outcome. Art is inherently social. It requires listening, empathy, negotiation, and shared responsibility. I design learning environments that emphasize collaborative discourse and shared language across disciplines, helping students understand how their individual choices affect collective systems. These relational skills are not ancillary; they are foundational to both artistic excellence and ethical practice.
I often employ world-building as a pedagogical framework, drawing on both artistic traditions and contemporary systems thinking. World-building teaches students how environments function; how values are embedded in structures, how rules shape behavior, and how small decisions ripple outward. This approach resonates strongly with contemporary scientific inquiry, where researchers grapple with invisible forces, complex systems, and phenomena that can only be understood through models, imagination, and collaborative interpretation. Art and science meet here: both rely on metaphor, modeling, and shared frameworks to approach the unknown.
Refined through the discipline of design training, world-building becomes a rigorous method for cultivating systems literacy, ethical authorship, and collaborative intelligence. Students learn not only how to create compelling work, but how to inhabit uncertainty, hold paradox, and design responsibly within complex ecosystems; capacities essential for artists, leaders, and engaged citizens.
Mentorship is central to my teaching practice, as a long-form relationship built on trust, clarity, and accountability. Through advising, transparent feedback, and modeling, I support students in developing agency, resilience, and a sense of purpose. I am particularly attentive to students navigating unfamiliar academic and professional systems, recognizing that clarity is a prerequisite for equity.
Ultimately, my teaching is grounded in care, clarity, and follow-through. Excellence is not achieved through pressure, mystique, or scarcity. It is sustained when students feel supported by structure, respected in their labor, encouraged to play seriously, and invited into meaningful inquiry. My goal is not simply to train students for their first job, but to equip them with the wisdom to adapt, collaborate, and contribute creatively throughout their lives.
Art has always been how humans make sense of the world.
My teaching honors that lineage; past, present, and future.

Artist Statement
Omni artist | World-Builder | Systems Thinker

The “Omni artist”—one who works across form, scale, and discipline, guided not by medium but by inquiry.
As an artist. I follow questions as they fracture, recombine, and reappear. Costume, performance, painting, fiber, cardboard, poetry, systems, simulation, pedagogy. Each is a different phase state of the same investigation. This multiplicity is not stylistic range; it is structural necessity. The world is not linear. Neither is the work.
My practice begins with mark-making, the smallest possible intervention. A mark is an act of contact: needle through cloth, pigment through air, body through space, breath through sound. It is how humans first said I am here, and how we continue to say I am here with care. In chaos theory, small perturbations reshape entire systems. In my work, a mark is never small. It is a seed condition. A beginning.
From point to line, line to pattern, pattern to system; meaning emerges, not by design alone, but by interaction. I understand mark-making as nonlinear: cumulative, sensitive, alive. A stitch alters tension. A cut redirects force. A pause shifts the whole field. Like the butterfly effect, intention passes quietly through matter and rearranges the future.
Objects in my work are not symbols; they are participants. Matter is not inert. Fiber remembers stress. Cardboard records compression. Surfaces carry histories of touch. Meaning does not sit on an object; it arises between object and observer. Observation matters. Attention collapses possibility into experience. In this way, my practice aligns with quantum thinking: the act of looking is not neutral. To witness is to intervene.
I work with world-building as both method and ethic. Worlds are not imagined into being; they are assembled through rules, rituals, materials, omissions, and care. Disguise. Reveal. Every system contains the conditions of its own instability. I am interested in the moment just before coherence breaks, and the fragile structures that allow it to return. What holds? What fails? What must be tended?
Time behaves strangely in my work. Past and future are entangled. Ancient mark-making and speculative systems coexist. Landscapes remember. Bodies archive. The present is not a point, but a field. Like particles moving through space-time, gestures leave traces long after contact has passed. Each piece is an experiment in continuity—an attempt to keep something alive across distance.
Underlying all of this is art as cognition. Art is not expression alone; it is a way of thinking that can hold uncertainty without rushing to resolve it. It allows paradox to remain generative. It permits doubt, wonder, play. In a universe governed by probability rather than certainty, art becomes a way to live with not-knowing—to love without guarantees.
This is where the work becomes a love letter. Not sentimental. Not nostalgic. But devoted.
A commitment to attention. To heartbeat as structure.
To small gestures repeated within chaotic existence. A butterfly and hurricane.
In physics, love looks like attraction, resonance, entanglement. In human terms, it looks like responsibility, integrity, and fingerprint on sidewalk. To make work is to say: I will stay with this. I will tend the system. I will keep making marks even when outcomes cannot be predicted.
In this sense, the artist is a sage—not above the world, but inside it. One who studies patterns across time, translates complexity into form, and carries forward what cannot be measured but must be preserved. As an omniartist, I do not move between roles; I synthesize them. Designer, educator, theorist, leader, maker—these are not identities, but vectors of the same force.
My work is devoted to building worlds—literal and conceptual—that help us move beyond survival toward connection, coherence, and possibility. Each mark is brief. Each touch is local. But in a nonlinear universe, that is enough.
Everything begins there.
A Manifesto for Constellation Thinking
(on Art, Systems, and Staying with the World)
Abandon the belief in singular genius. Align.
Nothing meaningful exists alone. Not stars. Not people. Not ideas. Meaning emerges through relationship—through distance, proximity, tension, resonance. A constellation is not a thing; it is a way of seeing. It is pattern recognized across separation. It is coherence without containment. It is the universe. Constellation Theory begins with a simple refusal:
Value does not live in isolated objects or exceptional individuals. It lives in the relational field between them. It is connection, entanglement, and simultaneous chaos.
In a constellation, no element dominates. No star explains the whole. Each point matters because of where it sits in relation to others. Remove one, and the pattern shifts. Add another, and new meaning becomes possible. This is how I understand art, pedagogy, leadership, and life itself- not as hierarchies to climb, but systems to tend like gardens.
Do not work in straight lines. Do not work in fields. Work quantumly, like fabric, string, and fiber of being.
Time is not a ladder. Past, present, and future coexist, turning into and onto itself, entangled, echoing, expanding, and collapsing. Ancient mark-making and speculative futures speak to one another without apology. A stitch carries memory forward. A gesture reaches backward. The present is not a moment; it is a convergence, dense with consequence.
Every mark is an event. Every event alters the field.
In chaos theory, small perturbations reshape entire systems. In constellation thinking, attention is the perturbation. What we notice, we activate. What we tend, we stabilize. What we ignore, we allow to decay. There is no neutral observation. To look is to participate. To choose where to look is an ethical act.
Art is sacred participation. Not an object; it is a relationship generator. Not an answer; a condition. Not a monument; a signal.
Art teaches us how to read systems without dominating them. It allows ambiguity to remain fertile. It creates space for paradox, play, and care. In a universe governed by probability rather than certainty, art is how we learn to live without guarantees—how we stay responsive instead of rigid, awake instead of efficient.
Constellations do not predict outcomes. They offer orientation.
This is why love matters here—not as sentiment, but as force. Love is what keeps systems from collapsing under their own weight. Love is sustained attention. Love is responsibility extended across time. Love is choosing to remain in relationship even when coherence is fragile and outcomes are unclear.
To make art is to say:
I will remain present. I will tend the field. I will not reduce complexity to convenience.
The artist, then, is not a solitary figure at the center of the frame, but a keeper of patterns. A translator between scales. A listener across time. A sage not because they claim authority, but because they are willing to hold—memory, contradiction, care- longer than is comfortable.
I reject extraction as a creative model. I reject urgency without ethics. I reject systems that demand brilliance without responsibility. Instead, I commit to slow intelligence. To work that accrues meaning through repetition, relationship, and repair. To structures that make room for human fragility alongside collective strength.
Constellation thinking asks different questions:
What is already connected that we have failed to see? What patterns are emerging beneath the noise? What becomes possible when we stop ranking and start relating? I do not build worlds to escape this one. I build them to understand it, to rehearse better ways of being, together.
Each mark I make is small. Each relationship is partial. But meaning does not require completeness. It requires enough points to see the shape.
That is the work.
That is the vow.
That is the constellation.

Seek to live artfully in love.