This collection consists of theatre costume designs, set designs, photographs, fabric samples, and production posters from Marianne Custer’s career as resident designer and head of the MFA design program in Theatre for the University of Tennessee, Knoxville from 1974-2018, as well as several designs from other theaters. The collection contains a set of designs from a Municipal Theatre of Hungary production of Medea, and the designs for the original production of The New Majestic Follies and Lyceum Gardens Revue, which later became the Broadway production Sugar Babies. Also included is a professionally bound, but unpresented, proposal to Clarence and Marian Brown for the establishment of funding and endowments for the theatre program at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.

The designs consist of a variety of materials, including paper, posterboard, color copies, and matboard, as well as several art mediums, including pencil and ink sketches, paintings, and collage. Play posters are from the Clarence Brown Theatre and Carousel Theatres at UTK, and the Hunter Hills Theatre, which was located in Gatlinburg and served the UT Theatre Department as a summer performance space from 1966 to 1978. Also included are five thumb drives and several CDs containing production photographs and digital copies of designs.