During a career that spanned four decades, she worked with such Broadway theatre legends as Jerome Robbins, Harold Prince, Gower Champion, David Merrick, and Bob Fosse.
She designed costumes and masks for the long-running off-Broadway production of the Jean Genet play The Blacks in the early 1960s.
More than forty years later, the retired and widowed O'Brien saw her biography in Playbill and contacted her via Brandeis University, where she was an artist in residence.
[3] In 1983, Zipprodt received a Tony Award nomination for her work on Alice in Wonderland, produced by The Mirror Theater Ltd’s Sabra Jones.
Zipprodt’s designs were exact recreations of the John Tenniel drawings for the original publication of the book Alice in Wonderland.