ADG Awards — Art Directors Guild

Why Three Film Categories Matter: The ADG’s decision to split film production design into Period or Fantasy, Contemporary, and (in some years) separate Animated categories is a correction to the Oscar’s single category, which inevitably gravitates toward elaborate period productions. Contemporary settings — the interiors of a New York apartment, the corridors of a tech campus, a modern hotel lobby — are production design achievements of equal difficulty that rarely receive Oscar recognition. The ADG’s structure acknowledges this imbalance.

Period or Fantasy Film

Excellence in Production Design — Period or Fantasy Film

The ADG’s flagship film category, covering historical and fantastical productions. Oscar alignment noted where applicable.

Year	Production Designer	Film	Oscar?
2025	Judy Becker	The Brutalist	ADG + Oscar
2024	Ruth De Jong	Oppenheimer	ADG + Oscar
2023	Christian M. Goldbeck	All Quiet on the Western Front	ADG + Oscar
2022	Patrice Vermette	Dune	ADG + Oscar
2021	Donald Graham Burt	Mank	ADG + Oscar
2020	Dennis Gassner	1917	Oscar: Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (Barbara Ling)
2019	Eugenio Caballero	Roma	Oscar: The Favourite (Fiona Crombie)
2018	Dennis Gassner	Blade Runner 2049	ADG + Oscar
2017	Stuart Craig	Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them	Oscar: La La Land (David Wasco)
2016	Colin Gibson	Mad Max: Fury Road	ADG + Oscar
2015	Adam Stockhausen	The Grand Budapest Hotel	ADG + Oscar
2014	Catherine Martin	The Great Gatsby	Oscar: Her (K.K. Barrett)

Contemporary Film

Excellence in Production Design — Contemporary Film

The ADG’s distinct category for modern-set productions — a recognition that contemporary production design is as complex and artistic as period work.

Year	Production Designer	Film
2025	Various	Conclave
2024	Sarah Greenwood	Barbie
2023	Jason Kisvarday	Everything Everywhere All at Once
2022	Florencia Martin	Power of the Dog
2021	Mark Ricker	Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
2020	Barbara Ling	Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood
2019	Various	A Star Is Born

Television Drama Series

Excellence in Production Design — One-Hour Episodic Series

Year	Production Designer	Series
2025	Various	Shōgun
2024	Various	House of the Dragon
2023	Various	The Crown
2022	Various	Squid Game
2021	Various	Bridgerton
2020	Various	Game of Thrones

Limited Series or TV Movie

Excellence in Production Design — Limited Series or TV Movie

Year	Production Designer	Production
2025	Various	Ripley
2024	Various	Fargo Season 5
2023	Various	The White Lotus (Season 2)
2022	Various	The Underground Railroad
2021	Various	The Queen’s Gambit
2020	Various	Chernobyl

Notable ADG Members

Production Designers Who Have Defined the Craft

The designers whose world-building has shaped entire genres and whose fingerprints can be traced through decades of cinema history.

Dante Ferretti ADG

Italian

Three-time Oscar winner and the most-nominated production designer in Academy history. Ferretti’s career spans Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Terry Gilliam, and Martin Scorsese — a range of directors whose visual ambitions consistently required sets of extraordinary scale and detail. His work for Scorsese on Gangs of New York, The Aviator, and Hugo represents three different visual worlds built almost entirely on stage at Cinécittà and other studio lots. Often works alongside his wife and regular collaborator, set decorator Francesca Lo Schiavo.

Satyricon The Age of Innocence Gangs of New York The Aviator Sweeney Todd Hugo

★ 3 Oscars • Multiple ADG Awards

Catherine Martin ADG

Australian

The most decorated Australian production designer in history and Baz Luhrmann’s long-standing creative partner — in both production design and costume design. Martin has won both the ADG Award and the Oscar for The Great Gatsby and has been Luhrmann’s visual architect since Strictly Ballroom. Her work is characterised by operatic maximalism: every surface, texture, and colour is amplified to hyperreal intensity. She is one of the very few practitioners to have won Oscars in both costume and production design categories.

Strictly Ballroom Romeo + Juliet Moulin Rouge! Australia The Great Gatsby Elvis

★ 4 Oscars (2 prod. design, 2 costume) • ADG Award

Colin Gibson ADG

Australian

The ADG and Oscar winner for Mad Max: Fury Road (2016) — one of the most audacious and complete production design achievements in modern blockbuster filmmaking. Gibson spent years designing and building the 150+ purpose-built vehicles and desert environments for George Miller’s epic, developing an entire fictional civilisation’s visual culture from its industrial scraps. His work was inseparable from the practical effects and stunt work that made Fury Road a landmark. The world he built is one of cinema’s most complete and original design statements.

Happy Feet Mad Max: Fury Road

★ ADG Award + Oscar • Most complete post-apocalyptic visual world in cinema

Adam Stockhausen ADG

American

The ADG and Oscar winner for The Grand Budapest Hotel (2015) and Wes Anderson’s primary production designer, responsible for the pastel, symmetrical, meticulously composed worlds that define Anderson’s visual signature. Stockhausen also designed 12 Years a Slave, Bridge of Spies, and Isle of Dogs — showing a range that extends far beyond any single director’s aesthetic. His ability to realise demanding directors’ precise visual visions makes him one of the most sought-after PDs working today.

Moonrise Kingdom 12 Years a Slave The Grand Budapest Hotel Bridge of Spies Isle of Dogs The French Dispatch

★ 1 Oscar • ADG Award • Wes Anderson’s primary visual collaborator

Patrice Vermette ADG

Canadian

Denis Villeneuve’s production designer for Arrival, Dune, and Dune: Part Two — creating two of the most distinctive world-building exercises in recent science fiction cinema. For Dune, Vermette developed Arrakis from geological research and desert photography, blending brutalist architecture with Islamic geometric patterns and ancient stone forms to create a world that feels simultaneously alien and archaeologically real. The ADG Award and Oscar followed. His work demonstrates how production design at its highest level is an act of civilisation-building, not set decoration.

Arrival Dune Dune: Part Two

★ 1 Oscar • ADG Award • Arrakis is the defining world-build of the decade