Nina Ruscio

Nina Ruscio is an Emmy nominated Production Designer, an Astra Award winner, and a nominee for the Art Director’s Guild Awards with a career spanning independent films, studio features, HBO dramas and series television. Her Emmy nomination is for production design on HBO Max’s The Flight Attendant.

In television, she is known for her work on all eleven seasons of the audacious series Shameless, as well as all six seasons of the raw crime family drama Animal Kingdom for John Wells Productions, a frequent and beloved creative partner. She’s built worlds for over a dozen pilots, designed close to 300 hours of series tv, and collaborated with a panoply of hundreds of marvelous directors, including Mark Mylod, Chris Chulack, David Nutter, Regina King, Silver Tree and John Wells, himself.

She began as an indie film designer, bringing a poetic realism to Charles Burnett’s The Annihilation of Fish, and crafting a surreal Americana for Alan Rudolph’s Breakfast of Champions. In studio movies, she lent her talents as an Art Director on big budget action films including Volcano, as well as Tony Scott’s Spy Game and Enemy of the State, before moving back to design more films including the colorful, high energy worlds of Shawn Levy’s early hits—Big Fat Liar, Just Married, and Cheaper by the Dozen.

She finds it funny and flattering how often people presume the worlds she designs are real locations – whether it’s the swoon-worthy Los Feliz home in Netflix’s real estate drama No Good Deed, the five bedroom midcentury indoor-outdoor Cody compound in Animal Kingdom or the fully immersive Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center set in her current design work on HBO Max’s The Pitt.