Best Visual Effects

Only 5 women have been nominated in the category of Best Visual Effects, including 1 in 2024.* This is less than 1% of the 838 nominees in this category and a ratio of 167 men to every one woman nominee. Four of the women nominated were white women: Suzanne M. Benson (1987), Pamela Easley (1994), Sara Bennett (2016), and Genevieve Camilleri (2021). In 2024, the first woman of color was nominated in this category (Kiyoko Shibuya). Two women have won, the first in 1987 (Suzanne M. Benson) and the second in 2016 (Sara Bennett). No women were nominated more than once; 39% of men were nominated 2 or more times.

There were 838 nominees for Best Visual Effects, and 4% were from an underrepresented racial/ethnic group.* Of the 29 underrepresented nominees in this category, the first was nominated in 1978 (Gregory Jein). There have been 4 underrepresented winners of the Best Visual Effects Award: Doug Chiang (1993), Eric Barba (2009), Adam Valdez (2017), and David Lee (2021). Twelve of the nominees were Asian, 9 were Hispanic/Latino, 5 were Black/African American, 2 were Middle Eastern/North African, and 1 was multiracial/multiethnic.

The percentage of one-time nominees was higher for underrepresented (77%) than white  (60%) nominees. There were two underrepresented nominees with 3 nominations each (R. Christopher White, Pablo Helman)-- the most nominations for underrepresented individuals. In contrast, the white individuals with the most nominations had 13 nods (Daniel Sudick, Dennis Muren).