Before every shoot, she prints a photo of her grandparents and tapes it to the camera. Her grandfather in his uniform. A private ritual. A quiet act of faith that the work in her hands is connected to something larger than herself.
Tonight, her grandparents were in the room when Autumn Durald Arkapaw won the Oscar for Best Cinematography at the 98th Academy Awards - making history as the first woman and first woman of color to win the award in the 98-year history of the Academy Awards.
In the history of the Best Cinematography category, only three women had ever been nominated before tonight - Rachel Morrison in 2018 for Mudbound, Ari Wegner in 2021 for The Power of the Dog, and Mandy Walker in 2022 for Elvis. Not one of them won. Arkapaw is the first woman to ever take home the prize - and the first woman of color to have even been nominated.
In 98 years, the camera finally turned around.
A Filipino-Catholic Girl From the Bay Area Who Shot Lenses From 2001
Arkapaw was born in Oxnard, California, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is of Filipino descent on her mother's side and African American Creole on her father's side. The Filipino side of her family is Catholic. She attended Loyola Marymount University studying art history before graduating from the AFI Conservatory's cinematography program in 2009. She started in advertising, moved to camera assistant work, and built her career quietly and steadily through indie film and television.
Her path into Sinners came through friendship and a text message. Rachel Morrison - who shot Fruitvale Station and the first Black Panther for Coogler - was unavailable to shoot Wakanda Forever and recommended Arkapaw. "Rachel texted me, and I was actually doing additional photography on Loki in Atlanta," Arkapaw recalled. "We did a Zoom call, and that's the first time Ryan and I met - we didn't meet in person - and the rest is history."
"It felt like we were long lost cousins," Arkapaw said of that first conversation with Coogler. "It just felt right, like I was meant to meet him and meant to be a part of that group."
When Coogler came to her with Sinners the challenge was unlike anything she had ever faced. He wanted to shoot on large format film - combining two formats that had never been used together on the same feature. Arkapaw shot Sinners on 65mm IMAX and Ultra Panavision 70 simultaneously - the same wide format Quentin Tarantino used for The Hateful Eight and that had been used on epic spectacles like Ben-Hur and The Greatest Story Ever Told. Warner Bros. confirmed it made her the first woman in the industry to ever shoot a feature film on 65mm IMAX.
For her lens selection, Arkapaw reached back in time - choosing anamorphic lenses engineered specifically for Sinners by Panavision genius Dan Sasaki, alongside glass pulled from cinema history. "I grabbed some other lenses," she said, "like the lenses from 2001: A Space Odyssey."
She photographed a 1932 Mississippi Delta juke joint with lenses that once captured a spacecraft orbiting Jupiter. The result is one of the most visually distinct films Hollywood has produced in a generation.
Shooting From the Heart - and From the Ancestors
On the set of Sinners, Arkapaw printed a photo of her grandparents - her grandfather in uniform - and taped it to the camera, a tradition she has maintained since working on the 2018 film Teen Spirit. Sinners also gave her the chance to include her own family directly - her aunt appears as an extra in the grocery store scene, thanks to Coogler's deliberate creation of a set that reflected community.
"Young girls will look up this nomination and see that film and will associate all the people that made it, people that are people of color," she said. "All of our heads of department are Black women, and I think that's important because you don't see that very often. Ryan creates that."
At a BFI masterclass weeks before the Oscars, an audience member remarked on the transcendent quality of her camerawork - likening the crane movement to the Holy Ghost as it floats across the church in her favorite Sinners scene, where Sammie returns home following the juke joint massacre. She received that observation with characteristic grace.
"You have to just always shoot from your heart," she told the young filmmakers gathered at BFI Southbank. She described the profoundly personal relationship of working with celluloid as verging on spiritual - the secluded intimacy of the ritualistic process, the feeling of being "untethered."
The Win Nobody's Precursors Predicted
Coming into tonight, Arkapaw had missed every major precursor award - losing at the BAFTAs, the British Society of Cinematographers, and the American Society of Cinematographers in the weeks before the ceremony. On paper, she was not supposed to win. The Academy voted differently.
During her acceptance speech, she thanked Coogler directly - "Thank you for believing in me and thank you for trusting me, and that's the kind of guy I get to make films with." She also thanked Rachel Morrison, the woman who opened the first door. "I have felt so much love from all the women on this whole campaign and gotten to meet so many people, and I just feel like moments like this happen because of you guys."
What It Means
"It's about photography. It's about an emotional format that someone wants to know my perspective on. If everybody's a white male, then that's just one perspective," Arkapaw said ahead of tonight. "I think there are more women now."
"It was very ambitious," she said of shooting Sinners on IMAX 65mm. "But for all the right reasons - ambitious for our ancestors, ambitious for people that look like us, getting to shoot this format, succeeding in that execution with the team. All those things are really important."
For the Christian community, Autumn Durald Arkapaw's story carries a thread that runs through the entire book of faith - the quiet, faithful person who shows up, tapes their grandparents' photo to their instrument, does the work with their whole heart, and trusts that the door will eventually open. Her Filipino family is Catholic. Her African American Creole roots run deep into the same Southern soil that Sinners is set in. Tonight she carried all of it to the stage at the Dolby Theatre and made history for every young girl who has ever stood behind a camera and wondered if there was a place for her.
There is. Autumn Durald Arkapaw just proved it.
Read our full Oscars 2026 winners list here.
