Milena Canonero Costume designer

Milena Canonero was born in Italy. She has designed costumes for the Vienna Staatsoper, the Salzburg Festival and the New York Metropolitan Opera (Arabella with Kiri Te Kanawa, Die Fledermaus, Il trittico, Andrea Chenier). She has also worked in the theatre for the Teatro di Roma (Roman Polanski’s Amadeus). Her work in film has earned her four Oscars for the costumes for Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon in 1975, Hugh Hudson’s Chariots of Fire in 1982, Sofia Coppola’s Marie-Antoinette in 2007 and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel in 2015. She also received Oscar nominations for Charles Shyer’s The Affair of the Necklace, Julie Taymor’s Titus, Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker and Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa. She has won three British Academy Awards for Cotton Club (Coppola), Chariots of Fire and The Grand Budapest Hotel and she was also nominated for Dick Tracy, Out of Africa and Barry Lyndon. She has also received the Career Achievement Award from the Costume Designers Guild for her life’s work.
She has collaborated with Steven Soderbergh on numerous projects creating costumes for Solaris, the film short Equilibrium from the trilogy Eros and Ocean’s Twelve. She was also the costume designer for Warren Beatty’s Bulworth, Roman Polanski’s Death and the Maiden, Norman Jewison’s Only You, Sam Pillsbury’s Love Affair, Louis Malle’s Damage, Barbet Schroeder’s Single White Female, (for which she was also chief set designer), Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather III, Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly, Tony Scott’s The Hunger, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and A Clockwork Orange, Alan Parker’s Midnight Express, and Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The menswear line that she designed after Chariots of Fire earned her the Prix Coty.
In 2017, she received the Golden Bear for lifetime achievement at the Berlin Festival. In the domain of opera, she found herself collaborating with Luc Bondy on the costumes for the 2009 production of Tosca and with Fanny Ardant for a production of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District at the Athens Opera in 2019