Makeup & Hair

The most decorated makeup artist in Oscar history with seven wins. Baker is the pioneer of silicone prosthetics and character transformation in modern Hollywood, responsible for some of cinema’s most memorable creature and character effects. He received the very first competitive Oscar for makeup in 1982 for An American Werewolf in London — the film whose exclusion from the previous year’s ceremony had prompted creation of the category.

A two-time Oscar winner celebrated for photorealistic prosthetics. His work adding the distinctive aging and bulk to Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour and then recreating Leonard Bernstein’s features on Bradley Cooper in Maestro — including the controversial prosthetic nose — are among the most talked-about makeup achievements of recent years.

Won the Oscar for The Whale (2023), where he created the full-body prosthetic suit that made Brendan Fraser appear to weigh 600 pounds — while still allowing a nuanced, physically active performance. The work on The Whale is regarded as a landmark in prosthetics design, requiring months of pre-production development and multiple layers of silicone appliances applied in a multi-hour process each day.

Three-time Oscar winner and one of Hollywood’s most experienced makeup artists. Neill is particularly associated with fantasy and science fiction — her work on the Pirates of the Caribbean and Beetlejuice franchises is iconic. She also won for Mrs. Doubtfire and is one of the judges on the long-running TV competition Face Off.

Three-time Oscar winner with a career defined by landmark prosthetic transformation work. Cannom’s achievement on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — creating seamless age-regression and -progression effects across a narrative spanning nine decades, applied to Brad Pitt across hundreds of shooting days — remains one of the most technically demanding achievements in the category’s history. His earlier wins for Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mrs. Doubtfire demonstrate the breadth of his craft across horror fantasy and physical comedy transformation.

Academy Award winner and co-founder — with Robert Kurtzman and Greg Nicotero — of KNB Effects Group, Hollywood’s most prolific practical makeup and creature effects studio. Berger won the Oscar for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and has overseen effects work across hundreds of productions over four decades. KNB’s roster encompasses everything from Tarantino’s practical work to HBO’s television creature effects — a studio that has defined the industrial scale of American practical makeup.

The most prolific creature and makeup effects supervisor in television history, and one of the rare department heads to cross over into full showrunner status. Nicotero co-founded KNB Effects and oversaw every season of The Walking Dead’s makeup effects before transitioning to executive producer and director on the same series. His career began under Tom Savini on Day of the Dead, and he has sustained that tradition of practical effects excellence across horror, fantasy, and action television spanning four decades. His knowledge of horror genre history is encyclopaedic and has shaped his creative choices throughout.

One of Hollywood’s foremost makeup effects artists for large-scale franchise productions. Harlow shared the Oscar for the 2009 Star Trek reboot — a film that required an extraordinary volume of alien character designs created in practical makeup — and has worked on J.J. Abrams productions and franchise work ever since. His ability to design and execute dozens of distinct alien or character makeups simultaneously, maintaining quality across a large crew, is one of the most demanding feats in the discipline. His work across the Pirates of the Caribbean series added to a reputation for handling the highest-volume character makeup work in contemporary Hollywood.