The Costume Designer Who Found His Calling in Santa Barbara

Branded Content Presented by Santa Barbara City College Office of Communications

In 2012, Jacob Kosarian moved more than 5,000 miles from Stockholm, Sweden, to Santa Barbara, as just one of a few hundred international students with their sights on Santa Barbara City College.

“It just sort of made sense,” he says of the move. “I felt like I was where I was supposed to be at that moment, surrounded by the people that felt and saw the world like I did.”

When Kosarian chose where to study abroad, he had his pick of several Southern California colleges. But none, he recalls, lived up to the hype the way Santa Barbara City College did. As he says, “Santa Barbara City College was one of the first ones that really stood out on the map.”

He was swayed, of course, by the ocean views and the weather, but what ultimately sold him was SBCC’s “good reputation,” and the folks at the International Office, who helped him feel at home.

Fast-forward 14 years, and Kosarian is still in California, in Los Angeles, working as a costume designer. He’s married to his wonderful partner, whom he fell in love with just a year after moving to Santa Barbara. At the time of our interview, he was excited about attending a screening of the film Bookends, an LGBTQ Jewish romantic comedy for which he was the costume designer. The movie, starring Academy Award–winning F. Murray Abraham and Caroline Aaron, was shown at this year’s Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

“It feels full circle,” he noted, “but not in a nostalgic way, because it’s in Santa Barbara where I sort of learned to take this work seriously, and bringing this project there feels very grounding.”

Costume design was not in his initial career plans, but a theater class in his first year at SBCC changed his trajectory. Or, more specifically, one theater teacher did. 

Pamela Shaw, associate professor and director of costume and makeup at SBCC, took Kosarian under her wing. “She taught me how to think like a costume designer,” he recalls. “And everything sort of fell into place from there.”

Shaw showed him the nuances of costume design as a tool of storytelling. It’s one of those dramatic arts, often unnoticed by audiences, yet incredibly powerful in shaping what they see and feel.

He worked on every theater production at SBCC over the next two years. In 2015, when he graduated, he received the costume design award, and his name was added to a plaque in the theater department that honors one student per year. For him, theater brought purpose, a chance to be part of something larger, to help tell a story. 

When asked to reflect on a moment that stayed with him from his time at SBCC, he recalls the end of his first major production, when the curtain dropped, and the audience rang out in applause. “That applause just brought this sense of euphoria,” he says. “It made everything we’d worked so hard for make sense.”

More than the audience’s reaction, it reminded him of the effect of what they were doing. 

“We live in a very rough world,” he muses, “and entertainment is the one place where people find joy and happiness and relief; whether it’s theater or film or music, it’s where we’re able to break free from the crazy that’s going on around us.”

After graduating, Kosarian moved to Ventura, where his spouse was living. There, he worked on stage productions at the Rubicon Theatre, while also returning to Santa Barbara to work on several shows at the Lobero Theatre.

During this period, he began transitioning into film, initially taking on student shorts and low-budget indie projects in Los Angeles — many of them connected to SBCC film students who invited him to design costumes for their productions. As his film work in L.A. steadily grew, he moved there in 2018 where his career in film costume design has steadily developed..

He traces his success back to SBCC, and especially to Shaw. It’s a story that highlights the power that one person can have in our lives.

“She cares about what she teaches,” he says. “She cares about how the student receives the information and that they can take it with them. I don’t know if I would be doing this had I not met her.”