Merideth Boswell is an Arkansas native and a production designer who has been nominated twice for an Academy Award. Among her best-known movies are How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Natural Born Killers, Apollo 13 and Bandits. Alongside her two Academy Award nominations, for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration for both How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Apollo 13, she and Michael Corenblith also were nominated for a Film Award for Best Production Design from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

She is an alumna of the University of Arkansas, with a Bachelor of Arts in ceramics. She also was recognized by the Arkansas Alumni Association in 2001 with a Citation of Distinguished Alumni.

She recently has worked primarily with Tommy Lee Jones, director for The Homesman, a film that opens Nov. 13 in U.S. theaters. She also has worked with Jones on the films The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and The Sunset Limited, the latter for HBO. Boswell currently is in Louisiana designing I Saw The Light, which stars Tom Hiddleston as Hank Williams and is directed by Marc Abraham. In addition to film work, she has designed interiors in New York, Los Angeles, Paris and Arkansas.

Boswell is the keynote speaker for the Interior Design Educators Council’s Southwest Regional Conference, called “Character of Place – Place as Character." She will present her lecture at 11 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 4, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall, on the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville.

The lecture is free and open to the public.