Last March 15 at the 98th Academy Awards, cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw won the Oscar for Best Cinematography for her work in the 2025 film Sinners. She became the first woman, first Filipino, and first Black person to win the award.
Durald Arkapaw is of Filipino descent on her mother’s side and Black Creole on her father’s side. She grew up in California, went to Loyola Marymount University to study art history, and then headed to AFI Conservatory, where she took the cinematography program in 2009.
In her work on Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, she used a combination of IMAX 15-perf and Ultra Panavision 70 cameras to shoot Sinners in rare 65 mm film. This marks her as the first female director of photography to shoot any movie on a large-format IMAX film.
Sinners is a supernatural action film set in 1932 Jim Crow South in Mississippi, where twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, return to their hometown to build a better life, but they are faced with a supernatural evil.
Dural Arkapaw’s historic Oscar win is part of Sinners’ historic run in the awards circuit. Sinners was nominated for sixteen awards at this year’s Academy Awards, which is the most of any film in history.
Alongside her Best Cinematography win, Sinners also won three Oscars: Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan, Best Original Screenplay for Ryan Coogler, and Best Original Score for Ludwig Goransson.
History runs in Durald Arkapaw’s blood. In an interview with Vogue Philippines, she shared that she looks up to her maternal grandfather, Guillermo Pagan Bautista from Pangasinan. A survivor of the Bataan Death March, Bautista evaded Japanese forces in the Philippines and fought with the resistance.
“He was always the most important man in my life. One of the biggest influences on my childhood and my family,” Durald Arkapaw told Vogue Philippines.
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