June Hudson trained in theatre design at the Royal College of Art and has had a varied and extensive career as a costume designer in both television and theatre. She first worked as assistant to Oliver Messel and then went on to design costumes for some of the most acclaimed television productions of the 1970s and 1980s. She has the distinction of being the only BBC costume designer ever to have taken the BBC Director’s Course. She left the BBC in 1990 to diversify her portfolio still further; as well as acting, role play and modelling (for David Bailey, among others), she also teaches and has by invitation worked as a portraitist and illustrator. She remains, first and foremost, an active designer and costume-design consultant.
Design drawings by June have been exhibited at the National Theatre and Chichester Theatre and her work is included in the RSC’s permanent exhibition at Stratford. Her designs also hang in the private collections of the BBC and the House of Commons. Her science fiction drawings continue to attract a great deal of interest, and periodically she makes copies of these available in limited edition prints.
For the last twenty years, June has frequently lectured and co-taught on character creation through costume for television, focusing especially on the use of colour in dramatic realisation. Venues for talks and workshops included the National Film Theatre, the University of Manchester, and the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television. Between 2006 and 2010 she has four times been invited to serve as a Lossett Visiting Scholar at the University of Redlands in Southern California, teaching intensive courses on design for science fiction television.