Janet Patterson

This Australian designer has forged a career working with strong female directors. Janet Patterson spent much of the 1970s studying costuming and interior design. By 1980, she was working as a production designer with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, working on numerous TV-movies like "Eden's Lost," "Come in Spinner" and Jane Campion's award-winning "Two Friends" (1986). After spending a decade in television, Patterson moved to the big screen with Gillian Armstrong's contemporary drama "The Last Days of Chez Nous" (1992), in which the spatial aspects of the settings and the characters interaction with those areas play a major role. She won critical praise and her first Oscar nomination (as well as BAFTA and Australian Film Institute Awards) for her Victorian and native costumes for Campion's acclaimed "The Piano" (1993). Again working with Campion, Patterson created both the settings and the costumes for "The Portrait of a Lady" (1996), picking up a second Oscar nod for Best Costume Design. Her work contrasted a bleak, wintry English countryside with colorful yet cruel Italian villas and created the sterile world inhabited by the heroine. Patterson followed with another reteaming with Armstrong on the period drama "Oscar & Lucinda" (1997).