Designer Eiko Ishioka was born in Tokyo on July 12, 1938. She passed away in January 2012 at the age of 73. After graduating from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Tokyo University of the Arts, she joined Shiseido. She worked as a graphic designer and art director before going independent and working in advertising design around the 1970s. Since the 1980s, she has been based in New York, where she has worked across a wide range of fields, including costumes for Hollywood films, Broadway musicals, and the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In 1987, she won numerous awards, including a Grammy Award for Best Album Package Design, for the cover design of Miles Davis's album "TUTU." In 1992, she won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design for Francis Ford Coppola's film "Dracula." Her work has been internationally acclaimed, and she was the first Japanese person to serve on the jury at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. Many of her works are included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

She was responsible for the costume design of all of the films of Indian film director Tarsem Singh, and was posthumously nominated for an Academy Award for Best Costume Design for her work on Mirror Mirror in 2012. This was Ishioka's last film.