Picture maker

Keith Cunningham (Image by Gregg Segal)

If you’ve gone to the movies in the past 30 years, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the work of Keith P. Cunningham, ’89 FAA. Since his first film credit, on the John Hughes production Baby’s Day Out (1994), he’s become a mainstay of Hollywood art departments, helping to create the look and feel of blockbusters such as Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and Star Trek (2009); Oscar winners such as Traffic (2000) and The Social Network (2010); and camp classics including Batman & Robin (1997) and Van Helsing (2004).

From project to project, decade by decade, Cunningham has worked his way up the art department ladder, from coordinator to set decorator to art director and everything in between, mastering each job and then moving on to the next level.

Today, Cunningham is a production designer—head of the art department, designer of sets, finder of filming locations. He works closely with the director and cinematographer to develop the visual template of the film and has a hand in everything that will be onscreen. Every detail you see—from the magazines on the main characters’ coffee tables to the wallpaper in their bedrooms to the style of their homes—has been painstakingly chosen by Cunningham and his collaborators to make stories come to life.

“Through my courses, I became very interested in the idea of using art and design to tell stories. ” —Keith P. Cunningham, ’89 FAA

For Cunningham, that attention to detail is what makes his work so satisfying. “Even the simplest life has so many layers to it,” he says, and it’s his job to find a perfect combination of textures, tones, colors, patterns and objects that will reveal things about who the characters are.

Cunningham first discovered his interest in movie magic while studying architecture at Illinois. “Through my courses, I became very interested in the idea of using art and design to tell stories,” he says. “And after I graduated, I made the leap to California.”

There, he attended the American Film Institute, and he’s been working in Hollywood ever since—a go-to collaborator for such A-list filmmakers as David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh and Ang Lee, ’80 FAA.

“Even the simplest life has so many layers,” says Keith P. Cunningham, who uses a combination of visual elements to reveal characters’ inner worlds. (Image by Gregg Segal)

In 2021, Cunningham won an Emmy Award for his work on the HBO murder-mystery series Mare of Easttown, which stars Kate Winslet as a hard-bitten detective in a blue-collar suburb of Philadelphia. Cunningham was an ideal production designer for the project, having grown up in a Chicago family of police officers, firefighters and teachers. His background provided him with all the tools he needed to create the world of the show. “I knew this cast of characters and how they lived,” he says, “and I was trying to find a kind of blue-collar poetry in real people and real towns.”

And that Cunningham did. The production design in Mare—featuring a mix of real-life locations and constructed sets—makes the city of Easttown feel like a main character and a world unto itself. Cunningham deserves the credit for that—or at least some of it.

“There are so many arts and disciplines and departments that make a show come together,” he says. “And when they really come together, like they did on Mare—that’s a rare thing in this business.

“I feel very lucky to be a part of it.”