Alumni couple continue reinventing themselves through entertainment industry changes
November 6, 2026 — In fifth grade, Leighton Aycock Bowers ’04 wrote a paper about Civil War uniforms.
“I knew from an early age I wanted to work in costume design,” says Leighton, whose career has involved many forms of costume design and research in the entertainment industry. “So when I started looking at colleges, I was only looking at really big schools that had this major. Grinnell was the outlier.”
Going to high school in North Carolina she learned of Grinnell College from her U.S. history teacher, Doug Cutchins ’93. “He was a cheerleader for Grinnell,” she recalls, “He pulled me aside specifically to tell me how much I would thrive there.” So Leighton visited and talked with Pip Gordon [former assistant professor of theatre] who spoke of what Grinnell would offer that seven years of costume design could not.
Leighton Aycock Bowers ’04 and John Bowers ’06 are pictured at the 2024 Emmy Awards where John won an Emmy for Outstanding Visual Effects in a Single Episode.
“She said, ‘Come here, and we’ll give you the independent studies you’ll need to get into grad school. You can study history, and we’ll find appropriate study abroad experiences for you,’” Leighton explains. “And it worked exactly the way she pitched it.”
John Bowers ’06 had a more circuitous route to his career in film and television special effects, coming to Grinnell from Wisconsin and double majoring in math and Russian. The couple met while students and kept up long-distance when Leighton went to UCLA for a Master of Fine Arts in costume design.
“Once I graduated, I moved out to LA to be with Leighton,” John says. His plan was to teach, which he did for two years in eighth grade math.
But Leighton had an idea for John that would call him away from the classroom. “I thought special effects would be a good job for him,” she says. “It satisfies his math brain with analytical problem solving, but it’s also creative.” She was working at the time as a research assistant for her grad school mentor, Deborah Nadoolman Landis, a costume designer and academician married to director John Landis.
In this 2019 photo, Leighton poses at Western Costume Co., where she oversaw the library and archives.
“Deborah connected me to her husband,” John says. “Coming from an academic background, I asked him about the best school for this.” Landis explained that the job was one you learn by doing and soon set up an informal apprenticeship with Matthew Merkovich, who was working on the visual effects (VFX) for his Don Rickles documentary.
“My first job in VFX was working at Matt’s dining room table and learning from him for six months,” John explains. Since those beginnings, the couple has continued expanding the scope of their work in even more unexpected ways.
Leighton started out in the film industry with costume research for the movies Inception and Invictus before joining the Costume Designers Guild as assistant costume designer. Her work in that role included Captain America: The First Avenger and Goosebumps.
In VFX, John’s creative work involves compositing, which he explains as “Photoshop at 24 frames per second.” While special effects are created physically in front of the camera, VFX focuses on modifying live-action footage post-filming. The compositor takes the still images and image sequences and makes the final product look like it was actually captured in-camera.
Leighton and John share a smile on Mac Field during their student days in 2003 shortly after they started dating.
Now a VFX supervisor working on shows, John’s career has spanned 18 years and 48 films and television shows through Netflix, HBO, and currently Prime Video and MGM Studios.
In 2024, John won his second Emmy for Outstanding Visual Effects in a Single Episode for the Netflix show Ripley, a black-and-white series that was filmed and edited in color. “The main artistic wrinkle was anticipating or noticing which elements would disappear in the black-and-white presentation, then revising shot compositions and element designs so they would still be legible to the audience when the tool of saturated color was removed,” John says.
The Bowers dressed up as characters
from the movie Clueless for Halloween
in 2023.
Leighton’s career highlight came unexpectedly when the librarian of the 100-year-old costume house, Western Costume Co., retired in 2014. With her expertise in costume research, the job was a perfect fit, and for more than a decade Leighton oversaw the library and archives, taking requests from designers calling with research questions.
“I would get requests for a photo of a Dallas bus driver from 1983 or whether or not they wore colored gloves in the 1940s,” she says. “We had an incredible library with so much information from the past century that it was like a treasure hunt.” She was instrumental in cataloguing the collections, which included original research and costumes from various films.
Since the 2023 strikes, work in the entertainment industry has been more volatile, which trickled down to the costume house. “Over half of the company was laid off,” Leighton explains. “The library still exists, but it is currently unstaffed.”
During Leighton’s tenure at the costume house, she and John decided to start a family and are now happily raising two young daughters. They also continue creating in their respective fields. Even mid-project, John’s always looking ahead for the next project.
“As with Leighton’s job, there have been ongoing changes to the industry and how things are made,” he says. “Even in the best of times, we’ve had to adapt.”
And so they have. Leighton is currently writing a book that Deborah Landis helped her secure. “Much of my work has been such a pleasure,” she says. “It gets at something Grinnell really recognizes and one of the reasons I went there: learning for the sake of learning is both fun and important.”
—by Melanie Drake ’92