Autumn Durald Arkapaw is the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Cinematography Finally, right?
Cinema is a complex, technical art, made up of many elements beyond the images, which are the ones that reach us. That’s why, when ordinary people or non-professionals talk about cinema, we often talk about cinematography, confusing it with directing or set design. To put it simply, the cinematography of a film is the way the movie is "captured" by the camera: its colors, mood, angles, and point of view, the distance or closeness of the gaze. In short, its visual signature. The director is the one who decides what happens, how actors move in the scene and story. The director of photography, on the other hand, is the person who decides how to use light and the camera to tell the story. As you can imagine, the two roles work in very close collaboration.
Who won the Oscar for Best Cinematography this year? Sinners
Cinematography is what we see, what we remember, and what we refer to when we talk about a shot that struck us. The Oscar for Best Cinematography is therefore a major award, and it was particularly significant that at the 2026 Oscars it was won by Autumn Durald Arkapaw, the first woman and first woman of color to win for Sinners, a politically and racially charged horror film directed by Ryan Coogler, which also took home four other awards: Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan, Best Original Screenplay for Coogler, and Best Original Score for Ludwig Göransson, who frequently collaborates with both him and Christopher Nolan and practically always wins.
Who is Autumn Durald Arkapaw
Born in 1979, the cinematographer of firsts was born in California and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. On her mother's side, she is of Filipino descent, and on her father's side, she comes from an African American Creole family. Her career, despite her young age, spans advertising, film, television, and music. In television, she received a nomination at the Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards for Outstanding Cinematography for the episode "Lamentis" of the Marvel series Loki in 2021. In 2022, she became a member of the American Society of Cinematographers. For the film Sinners (2025), she shot on 65mm film using a combination of IMAX 15-perf and Ultra Panavision 70 cameras, becoming the first female director of photography to shoot a film on large-format IMAX film.
A brighter future?
Debates about inclusivity and firsts at the Oscars happen every year. At the 2026 awards ceremony, for example, the ideological battle - according to Twitter - was mainly between Sinners and One Battle After Another. Even though both films share a socially and politically aligned message, the white vs. Black issue, as often happens in the United States, proved polarizing. However, Autumn Durald Arkapaw's win is significant in several ways. First, it highlights how certain areas of cinema (and the arts) are overwhelmingly male-dominated, such as cinematography and directing. The award for casting director, established for the first time in 2026 and won by Cassandra Kulukundis for One Battle After Another, showed that there are many women in the field. Why does this apparent segregation or gender imbalance exist? It certainly doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and it’s no coincidence that less recognized roles tend to be female, while the more glorified and awarded roles are mostly male. Hopefully, this victory serves as a sign, an opening, a message for all women aspiring to reach the highest levels in cinematography, in film and beyond.
