Ming Cho Lee, Doctor of Fine Arts
“What would American set design be like without him?” one commentator has asked. It’s hard to imagine. The most important figure in the history of your field, you transformed it from a craft into an art. Before you, sets were decorated; now they are designed. With the sensibilities of contemporary art, you chiseled away distracting props to reveal spare and powerful physical distillations of the main metaphor of the work. Your hundreds of productions, “exquisitely conceived and realized” and spanning drama, opera, and dance, have shown the many ways in which the set can serve the play. Your influence has flowed also from your decades of service as Chair of Design at the Yale School of Drama, where you have trained and mentored generations of our nation’s top theatrical designers. And you have nurtured even more talent by organizing and supporting “Ming's Clambake,” an annual gathering, unique to the design community, at which novices get to discuss their work with accomplished colleagues, producers, and directors. So vast are the number of your disciples and so broad is their impact that the era of set design we currently live in is already affectionately known as the Ming Cho Dynasty.
I hereby declare you recipient of the honorary degree Doctor of Fine Arts, entitled to all the rights, honors, and privileges appertaining thereto.
June 4, 2006