With her vision and definitely her love of dolls, Kitty Leech is partaking on a new adventure of writing. The sketches that you see displayed in our window are a work in progress for characters that may be in her future book, Elizabeth the Well Traveled Doll.  As we were putting the window together Kitty shared with wonderful story with me. 

“When I was 8 years old, I was given the most wonderful Christmas gift.  It was a beautiful antique doll with a fragile porcelain head.  But that wasn’t all, she also cane with a trousseau.  I was enchanted with her wardrobe, which was complete, carefully folded up in a wicker basket shaped like a trunk.  She had beautiful extravagant dresses and charming hats and accessories.  She even had shoes to match every outfit.  I named her Elizabeth.  I came to find out that this doll had belonged to my mother, and before her, my grandmother, who received Elizabeth from her parents when she was 8 years old.  Sometime later, my family went to live in Europe for a year.  We traveled all over and my sister and I attended school in Switzerland.  Elizabeth accompanied us everywhere traveling in her wicker basket, carefully folded up I her beautiful dresses.  She traveled on trains, on big and small boats and in taxis.  We found her a chair in the Paris flea market, and added to her hats and accessories along the way.  In the spring of that year a little gypsy woman who owned an antique shop next door to us, saw my sister and me playing with Elizabeth.  The dolly was attending a picnic with a teddy bear and a small stuffed dog.  Sometime later the lady came over and gave to my little sister a beautiful doll the same size as my doll.  Now Elizabeth had a friend.  My sister named her Dorothy.  Dorothy was quickly given her own wicker basket and after that, she traveled everywhere with us as well.  They have never since been separated.  This has inspired me to write the story Elizabeth the Well Traveled Doll, about a doll with beautiful clothes who travels around the world in a wicker basket and finds a friend.  It is still a work in progress.

Kitty Leech is a costumer designer, illustrator, photographer and teacher.  Her costume design credits include Gross Indecency; the Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, at the Minetta Lane Theatre, as well as productions in San Francisco, Toronto, Plymouth, England and London’s West End.  Other notable Off-Broadway credits include The Novelist, A Romantic Portrait of Jane Austen by Howard Fast, and Goblin Market at the Circle-in-the-square Theater (Downtown) for which she received a Maharam Award nomination.  For eight years she was resident costume designer for the Lyrics and Lyricists concert series at the 92^nd. St. Y.  She was designed costumes for numerous Off and Off-Off Broadway theatres, as well as for Republic national Bank at the Big Apple Circus, Banker’s Trust, and People magazine.  Other International credits include The Almeida Theatre, London, Carnavale in Venezia, and Festivale Inteatro in Polverigi, Italy, the Via and Exit Festivals in France, and The Edinburgh Festival.

Her Sketches have been shown at the Susan Teller Gallery in Soho, New York, Greenberg & Hammer Inc. 57^th St. NYC and at the Cosmopolitan Club in Philadelphia.  One of her sketches was awarded the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts Curator’s Choice at the San Francisco Print Fair in 2002. 

Her Photographs have been seen Off-Broadway in Black masks magazine, in the on-line exhibit of Here is New York, and in numerous NYU locations, publications and websites.  Kitty is currently on the faculty at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts Drama Department, where she was the resident costume designer for 128 years, and the Playwrights Horizon’s Theatre School.  She is an associate member of SCBWI and CBIG