Arts University Bournemouth has announced the death of Professor Pamela Howard OBE, the theatre designer and scenographer whose work and writing helped establish stage design as a discipline in its own right. Howard, who was born in 1939, held the roles of visiting professor and emerita professor at the university, titles that kept her in regular contact with students and staff long after a conventional retirement, and where she was a valued presence for students and staff.

Howard built an international reputation as a scenographer, designing for theatre across the world and arguing, in practice and in print, that the visual world of a production deserves the same critical attention as its text and performances. Her best-known book, What Is Scenography?, became a standard text for students and practitioners, and has been translated into seven languages, carrying her ideas far beyond British theatre.

Her connection with Bournemouth was a long one. In 2016 the university presented Drawing Theatre: Pamela Howard, an exhibition devoted to her work, which drew on her drawings and designs to show how a production takes shape on paper long before it reaches the stage.

Howard's influence is likely to be felt most in the generations of designers she taught and the readers who encountered scenography through her writing. By treating the stage picture as a language with its own grammar, she gave theatre design a framework that students, directors and designers continue to use, and her death closes a career that shaped how the field understands itself.