Three-time Tony-award winner Desmond Heeley (1931-2016) was a British-American costume and set designer who worked primarily in theater, ballet, and opera. His productions have graced the stages of major theaters in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Australia, and Europe, including the Royal Opera House, the Metropolitan Opera, Houston Ballet, the National Ballet of Canada, Australian Ballet, and the Stratford Festival in Ontario. This collection contains Heeley's sketches and designs, along with production documents, photographs, correspondence, audio recordings, and other memorabilia relating to his life and work.
Lillie Rovno was deployed by the United States military in Germany, Japan, Alaska, and Hawaii, and continued to travel the world in later years. A scholar of Russian culture interested in performance arts, Rovno collected materials on a broad array of art forms: Kabuki and Japanese visual arts, ballet, Jewish music, and Italian music. The collection includes numerous photos, some autographed, of prominent ballet performers from the former Soviet Union, Cuba, and the U.S., with many of the photos documenting visits of Soviet ballet companies to the U.S. in the 1980s and early 1990s. The collection also contains musical scores from Italy, the U.S., and Israel, including Israeli songbooks from the early 1950s.