Every Oscar Nomination for Best Directing

A comprehensive interactive guide to all Oscar-nominated directors throughout the award's history.

Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners is a bespoke exploratory data visualization that celebrates film directors recognised by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It contains data across 98 years of the award nominations, 258 directors with 6K+ films they have made.

Preview of the interactive data visualization of Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners in its default state, showing the title card

Preview of a fragment of the interactive data visualization Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners, showing the 82nd Academy Awards card for 2009, where Kathryn Bigelow won for her film The Hurt Locker

Goal

To get a bird's eye view of all recognized directors with a brief overview of their filmography

My role

Concept, data curation and research, design, and development

Data Sources

AMPAS, Wikipedia, IMDb

Tools & Technologies

R for data scraping, wrangling, analysis
JSON for structured data
D3.js for data visualization prototype, data manipulating and SVG-based rendering
Svelte for reactive UI
Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop for images processing, poster design

Live project Support on Behance

Work in progress, animated circular layout data visualization with 6.3k+ dots plotted preview displays Academy Awards for Best Directing throughout the entire history of the Oscar ceremony — A work-in-progress animation which shows navigation between directors along the circumference of the data visualization with the summary displayed in the center of the layout, originally published on LinkedIn, February 2026

As a film viewer — an irregular and not particularly picky one — I occasionally find myself looking up information about different directors purely out of curiosity: checking some biographical details, exploring their filmographies, or something along those lines. At some point, I became interested in seeing their work in a more systematic way, in a broader context. So for quite some time now, I’ve been collecting data, looking for connections and patterns — simply enjoying the process. And on the eve of another Oscar ceremony, I became curious to explore the creative legacy of the world’s renowned directors specifically through the lens of this award.

Preview of the desktop version of the interactive data visualization of Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners on a FullHD monitor screen standing on a white desktop in a bright office — Preview of the project's title page

Work Process

My main goal was to get a complete picture with all nominations across all years, clearly marking the winners among them. Once I settled on the format — an interactive exploratory tool — I set myself two additional tasks: to create a reference page for each director, including their full filmography, and to make it possible to view nominees year by year to understand which works were considered together.

With this general plan in place, requirements outlined on both macro and micro levels, and a vague sense of the final product, I began working.

Working with Data

The biggest challenge, unsurprisingly, was collecting and processing the data. I’ll admit, it was unexpected to see more than six thousand film titles in the final dataset.

This stage alone took roughly a third of the entire project time

Naturally, the primary source was the AMPAS archive, from which I obtained the list of all directors along with their nominated works. For biographical details and filmographies, I turned to Wikipedia and IMDb.

A fragment of a prepared JSON file with information about Oscar-winning directors for interactive data visualization — A fragment of a prepared JSON file with information about Oscar-winning directors

A significant amount of time went into cleaning, verifying, and organizing the data. I removed commercials, music videos, TV films, and short films from the filmographies. During spot checks, however, I discovered that some documentary works and collaborative projects still slipped into the final lists — things not marked in the collected data. The only way to clean the list perfectly would have been to manually review all 6,000 titles, so at this stage I decided to leave the filmographies as they were, adding a note about this in the reference section.

I chose to merge all data into a single file to reduce the amount of computation needed on the client side and to speed up the application. The hierarchical structure of the data naturally suggested the format: keeping only what was necessary, I generated a JSON file fully ready for loading into the interface.

In addition to the data itself, I also needed to gather portrait photos of the directors and posters of the nominated films. I processed all the images using simple scripts and some manual manipulations: unifying their style and composition, aligning and cropping portraits, removing color to avoid visual noise, and bringing everything to a consistent size and appearance.

Visual Analysis and Prototyping Data Visualization

In my practice, I don’t always start with paper sketches. When planning data-heavy projects, it’s often easier for me to jump straight into code to visually analyze the dataset and see how the items are distributed. At the early stage, I usually already have some idea in mind, and this is where I check how well my assumptions align with the actual data. This phase often naturally transitions into prototyping. Based on the results, I adjust my vision of the project and find the direction to move forward. I don’t follow a strict framework — my approach is flexible, contextual, fluid.

Work in progress circular layout data visualization with 6.3k+ dots plotted preview — Some layouts from the process of searching for the visualization form

Work in progress circular layout data visualization with 6.3k+ dots plotted preview with the directors' names on the outer radius — Some layouts from the process of searching for the visualization form

After trying several options, finally I settled on a radial layout, which allowed me to place all data compactly. I refined it a bit more, chose the starting point, checked the scale of details on desktop screens, experimented with colors.

Eventually, I arrived at a donut-shaped layout, with the central area reserved for on-demand details. I saved the prototype from browser as SVG-file (SVG Crowbar ❤) to refine the details in a graphic editor.

Designing the Visualization

While working on the layout and thinking about how to design the legend explaining that the concentric circles represent decades, I came up with the idea to make it interactive.

This way, interacting with the visualization allows exploring the data from two perspectives: studying directors (moving along the circumference of the radial layout) and viewing nominees for each ceremony (hovering over the timeline extending from the center outward).

Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners data visualization legend explaining that the concentric rings represent years ranging from 1928 to 2025

Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners data visualization legend explaining that the data glyphs, which are distributed along the circumference, show information about the directors

For the central area, I designed a card with three possible states:

Title state — shown by default
Director summary — when a director is selected; includes name, portrait, life dates, number of films, nominations, wins, and a list of nominated titles
Oscar summary — when hovering over a specific year; includes all nominees with film titles and the winner marked

Animated circular layout data visualization with 6.3k+ dots plotted preview displays Academy Awards for Best Directing year by year throughout the entire history of the Oscar ceremony — An animated preview from the development stage, demonstrating interaction with the timeline legend, and displaying a summary card of the Oscar ceremony for the selected year, full version with all 98 awards was published on LinkedIn, February 2026

It seemed like a natural stopping point, but I wanted to have more details at hand — some filters, a quick way to find a specific director, or jump to nominees of a particular year. All of this went into the sidebar.

Preview multiple desktop layouts of the interactive data visualization of Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners with a focus on diffent states in the sidebar, showing summary cards of the award and the director, a table with all nominated directors, and the full list of awards — Sidebar preview with information according to different application states: an award card for a specific year with a list of nominees and a highlighted winner; a director card with brief information, a list of nominated films for Best Director with highlighted winners, and a full filmography; a table of all directors who have been nominated for an Oscar; a list of all Best Director awards with a list of nominees and winners.

Sidebar Design

The sidebar follows the same interaction logic as the visualization: three application states (default global view, director details, and award details). For the global state, I also needed to support exploring data from two perspectives — by directors and by awards.

To avoid overloading the default screen, I split the information into separate tabs (Directors and Awards), displayed reference data in tables, and added some functionality: name search and sorting options for directors, and navigation by year or ceremony number for awards. I also added a separate tab with a short description of the project.

Contextual details appear in an overlay window above the sidebar.

Multiple design options for the sidebar template layouts to display award details, part of the interactive data visualization of Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners — Mockups of different versions of cards with details about the director and the award

Multiple design options for the sidebar template layouts to display director's details, part of the interactive data visualization of Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners — Mockups of different versions of cards with details about the director and the award

Mobile Version

The visualization was originally designed for interaction on FullHD monitors, but of course, ignoring mobile devices (unfortunately) wasn’t an option.

Still, I didn’t try to fully replicate the desktop experience on mobile, though I did adapt the visualization by switching from polar to Cartesian coordinates for small screens. Naturally, on smartphones, a tabular format is far more convenient, so it became the default option.

Multiple screens for mobile demo of the interactive data visualization of Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners

Development

Although the development stage is described last here, in practice it ran in parallel with the design work. This approach is more natural for me — it lets me quickly test how a particular solution will look, how usable it is in practice, and whether it’s worth refining further. Essentially, it’s the same work with a high‑fidelity prototype, just not in Figma but already deployed on a server.

The entire application is built with Svelte (which is wonderfully convenient for development and provides excellent performance) and D3 (an unmatched tool for structuring and managing DOM elements and generating data‑driven graphics).

The core work revolves around structural components — those directly responsible for rendering page elements and handling interactions: generating and updating the SVG visualization, tables, detail pop‑ups, search and sorting forms, tab switching, and displaying images, text, and links.

At the heart of the application is the stores module, which contains the State Machine. It ensures that all components work in sync: opening the correct windows and tabs, highlighting elements relevant to the current context, and sorting data properly.

There are also separate modules that update the page URL according to the selected director or ceremony number. This allows saving a link that, when opened, will display the corresponding detail window.

Application components tree of the interactive data visualization of Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners — Application components tree

Animated preview of the circular layout data visualization Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners — An interactive visual reference exploring every director nominated for the Academy Award for Best Directing, featuring filmographies, nominations, wins, and year‑by‑year insights across ceremonies from 1928 to today

Additionally, I implemented basic keyboard navigation for the detail cards (moving backward/forward with arrow keys, closing with Escape), and refined the search interaction (normalizing input to avoid issues with diacritics, adding a three‑character minimum before showing matches to avoid overwhelming the drop-down list with suggestions).

View project

Large format printed poster with the static version of the data visualization of Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners is framed in a thin black frame, standing on the floor in a bright room — Printed version of Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners data visualization

Poster Design

I also created a large‑format print poster featuring a static version of the visualization.

The outer radius displays the directors’ names, each accompanied by the number of nominations and wins. Below the visualization is a table listing all winners in chronological order, with repeated wins marked and the total number of statuettes indicated for each director.

This version is perfect for waiting rooms or lobbies — something intriguing to look at while passing the time.

Large format printed poster with the light static version of the data visualization of Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners

Close-up of details of the printed poster with the light static version of the data visualization Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners

Close-up of awards table of the printed poster with the light static version of the data visualization Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners

For the printed edition, I also designed a dark theme. Inspired by the ornate interiors of the award ceremony venues, I chose a palette of deep, rich red paired with shimmering gold.

Preview of the printed poster with the dark red-and-gold static version of the data visualization Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners