Biography
Debra McGuire is a fine artist, fashion designer and costume designer, and is best known for her ten year run on the hit show Friends and for designing many of David Mamet's film and theatre projects. Her collaborations with Mamet include Phil Spector (starring Al Pacino and Helen Mirren), which was nominated for 11 Emmys, and in which she was nominated for Best Costume Design.
McGuire has also designed many of Judd Apatow's film and television projects. She is currently designing the fifth season of the television series New Girl, as well as The Grinder (starring Rob Lowe and Fred Savage), Fresh Off the Boat (starring Randall Park and Constance Wu) and Cooper Barrett's Guide to Surviving Life, all for 20th Century Fox Television. In 2015, McGuire designed the feature National Lampoon's Vacation, starring Ed Helms and Christina Applegate.
She began designing costumes for a dance theatre company in Paris in the early eighties. In 2007 McGuire won the NAACP Award for Best Costume Design for Atlanta, at the Geffen Playhous, and in 2006 she was nominated for an Ovation Award for Best Costume Design for Boston Marriage, also at the Geffen Playhouse.
McGuire is primarily a fine artist, with a career that began as a painter, working and teaching in her Bay Area studio. She became an instructor at colleges and universities in Northern California, a jewelry and accessories designer in New York, as well as a fashion designer, fashion consultant, couturier (with a store in Pacific Palisades, California for 10 years) and costume designer. McGuire has been speaking at galleries and art colleges on the East Coast, such as Pratt Institute, Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University, on the subject, "The Refinement of Process: Visual Journey of the Artist as Costume Designer."
20th Century Fox