Oscar Directors Data Visualization

Desktop preview of the Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners interactive data visualization

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.

My role: Concept, data curation and research, design, and development

The dataset

It contains data across 98 years of the award nominations, 258 directors with 6K+ films they have made.

Data sources: AMPAS, Wikipedia, IMDb

Academy Awards for Best Directing: data is displayed in radial layout with with directors plotted along the circumference and films coded with bubbles, with Oscar nominees and winners highlighted, arranged along the radius with older ones closer to the center

Designing for exploration

The tool allows you to study directors or nominations for every year since 1928, interacting accordingly with the area along the circumference or with the timeline legend, which is located at 6 o'clock. Details and controls, such as sorting data, searching by name or year, and quick navigation, are located in the sidebar.

Sidebars preview with details for various active states

Close-up of details of the interactive data visualization Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners

One system, 2 formats

For the mobile version, the visualization was adapted by switching from polar to Cartesian coordinates and a tabular format became the default option.

Preview of screens of the mobile version of the interactive data visualization Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners

Additionally, a large-format poster was designed both in light and dark themes.

Printed version of Best Director Oscar Nominees and Winners data visualization with close-up of some details

View live project or learn more about the work process.

Explore directors one by one moving across the radius

Tools used: R (data work), Svelte and D3 (interactive), Adobe Illustrator (print)

0 likes · 15 views · Mar 26, 2026

An exploratory visualization of 98 years of Best Director Oscar history, built for web, mobile, and print.

Timeline

Jan 4, 2026 - Mar 2, 2026