Marianne Custer was born July 12, 1947, in Minneapolis, MN to Herbert Thomas and Evelyn Florence (Jacobsen) Custer. As an undergraduate student at the University of Minnesota, she worked briefly in theatre as a mime, but realized that costuming was her true passion after volunteering to assist the theatre designer. Custer completed an MFA in Costume design from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1973, and worked as the Resident Costume designer for the University of Colorado, Boulder, before accepting a position as costume designer and assistant professor for UT in 1974. She would go on to help found the Master of Fine Arts program in design at UT in the early 1980s, and continued as resident designer and head of the MFA design program until her retirement in 2018.

Alongside her work at UT, Marianne Custer has also designed internationally for the Theatre des Halles, the National Theaters of Germany and Hungary, and the Municipal Theatre of Istanbul. Her work has appeared on Broadway, off-Broadway, and with several regional theatres and repertory companies. Custer’s work has been showcased in many exhibitions, including three appearances in the Prague Quadrennial Exhibition, at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, for World Stage Design in Toronto, and in Theatre Design and Technology, the journal of the United States Institute for Theatre Technology, Inc. (USITT).

The University of Tennessee awarded Custer with the 1998 Thomas Jefferson Prize, honoring a tenured or tenure-track faculty member who has demonstrated excellence in research and creative activity, as well as the James R. and Nell W. Cunningham Outstanding Teaching Award in 2006. She has won the Triangle Award for Costume Design in North Carolina, and the Knoxville Coalition Award for Costume Design. In 2009 she won the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Costume Design for the production of Alice at the Round House Theatre in Bethesda, Maryland.