Joanna Johnston

Biography

Costume designer Joanna Johnston is a respected name in film business and one of the most talented and sought after in her craft. She is mostly associated with the films of Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis but she also provides the costumes for other directors and can do basically of everything, providing the wardrobe from two different World Wars films to the class of the 1950's and even going to a distant future in crazy time travels. Different films, different styles but always with the same impeccable quality. She started in the business as an assistant costume designer under the supervision of Anthony Powell in films like Death on the Nile (1978), Tess (1979), Evil Under the Sun (1982) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), with the latter being her first work with Spielberg, who noticed her efforts and selected Joanna to provide the costumes in Kenya for his next project The Color Purple (1985). With Hellraiser (1987) she got her very first costume designer job and from then on she got her association with Zemeckis in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Back to the Future Part II (1989), Back to the Future Part III (1990), Death Becomes Her (1992), the multitude of periods of Forrest Gump (1994), Contact (1997), Cast Away (2000), The Polar Express (2004) and Allied (2016). With Spielberg, their collaborations resulted in works such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Munich (2005), War of the Worlds (2005), War Horse (2011) Lincoln (2012) - earning her first Oscar nomination. - and most recently The BFG (2016). Her versatility and quality can also be attested in Far and Away (1992), The Sixth Sense (1999), About a Boy (2002), Valkyrie (2008), Pirate Radio (2009) and Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015).