Gino was a former student and apprentice of National Artist Salvador Bernal who encouraged him to pursue further studies in Set and Costume Design. Gino attended the Masters of Fine Arts program in Theater Design at New York University with the aid of a Fulbright Scholarship and an Asian Cultural Council grant. He was also given the Meier and Seidman awards for excellence by NYU’s Department of Design in 2001.
Gino has designed sets and costumes for over 100 theatre productions in Manila, Singapore, China, Taiwan, Japan and New York. He has done design work for television film, and museum exhibitions as well.
He was awarded the World Stage Design bronze medal for his set design for the Philippine Opera Company’s Spoliarium at Toronto, Canada in 2005. He later received the WSD silver medal for the costume design of Dulaang U.P.’s Measure for Measure at Taipei, Taiwan in 2017.
In 2015, he co-authored a book entitled “Fashionable Filipinas: A History of the Philippine National Dress 1860-1960” with Mark Lewis Higgins. He was also lecturer at the Fine Arts Program of the Ateneo de Manila University.