Ruth E Carter, the costume designer best known for her work on the Marvel blockbuster Black Panther, has made history as the first Black woman to win two Oscars.
Carter won her first Oscar in 2019 for Black Panther, then becoming the first Black person to win the costume design category.
At this year’s ceremony she was recognised for her achievement on the superhero film’s sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, in a competitive field that also included Catherine Martin for Baz Luhrmann’s biopic Elvis and Shirley Kurata’s costumes for the multiverse epic Everything Everywhere All At Once.
“I pulled myself up from my bootstraps,” Carter said after her win on Sunday night. “I started – single-parent household. I wanted to be a costume designer. I studied, I scraped, I dealt with adversity in the industry that sometimes didn’t look like me. I endured.
“So I feel that this win opens the door for other young costume designers may not think that this industry is for them and hopefully they’ll see me and they’ll see my story and they’ll think that they can win an Oscar too.”
Carter has been nominated four times in total: in 1992 for Malcolm X, then in 1997 for Steven Spielberg’s period drama Amistad, before her Black Panther wins.
She joins a small league of Black actors and creatives who have won multiple Academy Awards, including Denzel Washington – who became the first Black actor to win two Oscars in 2002 – as well as Mahershala Ali, who has won twice for Moonlight and Green Book.
One of Carter’s earliest roles was on 1989’s Do the Right Thing, directed by Spike Lee – who has become one of her longtime collaborators over a three-decade career.
“When we made that film, we were seeing a future of Black people in storytelling,” Carter told the Guardian in a 2021 interview. “It was a forward-thinking idea when we made that film.”
Her work on Black Panther has been acclaimed for its Afrofuturist take on superhero costumes, drawing from Indigenous influences across the African continent and imbuing them with a technological bent to tell the tale of fictional kingdom Wakanda, a world power that has remained hidden from the rest of the globe.
“The opportunity to infuse the different cultures around Africa was a huge honor,” she said. “I felt there were still people who have this backwards mindset that Africa is just one monolithic place, people living in huts with flies on their faces.”
