Joanna Johnston

Joanna Johnston (born 1953) is an English costume designer for film. She is best known for frequent collaborations with American film directors Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis and M. Night Shyamalan. She was nominated for both BAFTA and Academy Awards for Best Costume for her work on Lincoln and Allied. In 2018, Johnston received the Career Achievement Award from the Costume Designers Guild.

Johnston's first solo designing job was for director Robert Zemeckis's Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). The working relationship with Zemeckis continued, through Back to the Future Part II (1989), Back to the Future Part III (1990), Death Becomes Her (1992), Forrest Gump (1994), Contact (1997), Cast Away (2000), The Polar Express (2004), and Allied (2016).

Johnston is also an established member of Steven Spielberg's creative team. She worked with the director on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) as Anthony Powell's assistant, as wardrobe supervisor for the Kenya unit in The Color Purple (1985) and then costume designer on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). They worked together again on Saving Private Ryan (1998), War of the Worlds (2005), Munich (2005), War Horse (2011), Lincoln (2012) and The BFG (2016).

Costume designer and historian Deborah Nadoolman Landis has used Johnston as an example of how costume designers "serve their directors as precisely as possible, along the way making incalculable contributions to the look and feel of those pictures".