Małgosia Turzańska

Polish film costume designer. She has worked on such productions as ‘Stranger Things’, ‘To Hell’, ‘The Green Knight’, and ‘Hamnet’. In 2026, she received an Oscar nomination for her work on 'Hamnet'.

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Małgosia Turzańska, photo: Savion Washington / Getty Images

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Małgosia Turzańska was born in 1980 in Kraków, and later raised there. As a teenager, she moved to the United Arab Emirates, and then, in 2005, she settled in the United States. She returned to Europe for a time to study at the DAMU Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Czechia, where her film career began.

In 2009, her colleague Václav Jiráček was cast in the Polish-Czech film Janosik: A True Story, directed by Agnieszka Holland and Kasia Adamik. As Turzańska spoke both Polish and Czech, he recommended her to the directors. The future costume designer became Holland's assistant, and thanks to her presence on set, she had the opportunity to participate in the work of the set design and costume departments, quickly discovering that costume design was what she wanted to pursue.

In an interview with Maria Czok on Polskie Radio Programme II, she recalled:

This way, I observed what costume designers do, what they fix and what they don't fix. Because there are moments when a crooked collar is important, and there are moments when the actor is in such a deep emotional state that no one will notice it. You have to sense it. And that is the most important lesson – that costumes are not the most important part of a film. If the emotions are genuine, no one will notice if something is wrong with the costume. We can help, but we can also hinder.

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JANOSIK. PRAWDZIWA HISTORIA ZWIASTUN HD

Working with Agnieszka Holland proved to be a turning point in the career of the aspiring costume designer. In an interview with Bartosz Czartoryski from Onet, the artist added:

That's when I realised that this is what I really wanted to do in life. When I landed in the States, I started studying at the Tisch School of Arts, made some great friends in the film department and, starting with secretly sewing costumes in the school studio for small amateur productions, moved on to bigger and bigger projects.

Overseas, she made one film after another. Starting with short films, she quickly rose through the ranks, becoming a costume designer for increasingly larger productions. In 2011, she designed the costumes for The Broken Tower, directed by James Franco, and a year later for Rama Mosley's fantasy comedy The Brass Teapot. 2013's Ain't Them Bodies Saints turned out to be an important film in her career. The crime melodrama with an all-star cast, directed by David Lowery (known for Ghost Story, among others), led the Polish designer to later help create the acclaimed The Green Knight with the director.

Recalling her professional beginnings, Turzańska said on Polish Radio II:

I didn't shy away from interpreting scripts differently or thinking for myself. I didn't try to fit into the New York world. I cultivated what I grew up with: my communist childhood, playing with sticks and pebbles, making something out of nothing. It made it easier for me to imagine certain things.

The following years brought the artist a number of successful projects. In 2015, Turzańska created costumes for Rebecca Miller's comedy Maggie's Plan, starring Greta Gerwig, Julianne Moore and Ethan Hawke, whom she met again a few months later when designing costumes for Ti West's western The Valley of Violence.

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'The Green Knight', dir. David Lowery, photo: Eric Zachanowich / Forum Film Poland

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2016 proved to be particularly fruitful for Turzańska's career: she co-created the film Hell or High Water, nominated for four Academy Awards – one of the most interesting Hollywood films of that season. David Mackenzie's film, starring Jeff Bridges and Chris Pine, became a great example of how a costume designer can realise her own artistic ambitions while respecting the entertaining nature of the tenth muse. It is no coincidence that in the following years, the Polish artist worked for A24 several times. It’s a studio that sets new standards in American cinema and skilfully combines artistic independence with commercial appeal in its films.

Her search for further challenges also led her to the world of television series. In 2017, Turzańska designed the costumes for Stranger Things, one of the most talked-about and important series of the past decade. For her work, the Polish designer received a nomination for the Costume Designers Guild Award, a distinction that is proof of industry recognition. It was not the last, as the following years brought her many other impressive and award-winning projects.

One of the most important was David Lowery's 2022 The Green Knight, a big-budget fantasy tale based on the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The story of King Arthur's rebellious nephew, played by Dev Patel, who sets off to meet the Green Knight, combined art-house with entertaining adventure cinema, and the film delighted viewers with its visual beauty. Turzańska spoke about this project in an interview with Bartosz Czartoryski:

I didn't start with the clothes or historical research, but with a kind of philosophical treatise found in the script, which talks about free will, religion, individualism and fatalism. I approached these topics quite emotionally, and that's how the costumes came about. David is a fantastic screenwriter, but he gave me a lot of freedom and, for example, only specified the colour of Gawain's coat, which was to be yellow. And that was probably the only costume directive from the script, the rest was my interpretation.

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'Hamnet', dir. Chloe Zhao, photo: Agata Grzybowska / Focus Features

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On set, Turzańska opted for eco-friendly costumes, foregoing the use of fur, leather and wool clothing in the film.

I wanted to approach it from a completely different angle, so I started looking for other materials and found a fabric made from tree bark. That's why the Green Knight's coat is, well, a tree, huge pieces of this material sewn together, and I have to say that to give it a leather texture, I rubbed baby oil into the coat all weekend. And the costume itself became a tree.

Turzańska received another nomination from the Costume Designers Guild for her costumes for The Green Knight, as well as awards from critics in Chicago and Seattle.

Three years later, Turzańska she was showered with more nominations and awards. All thanks to Chloé Zhao's Hamnet, a fictional costume drama about William Shakespeare's wife mourning the loss of her son, which was released in Polish cinemas in January 2026. Agnieszka Kowalska wrote about the costumes on Libertyn.eu:

The characters' clothes seem to breathe, crack and decay along with them. The costume designer completely turned Elizabethan costumes upside down, creating something that seems incredibly contemporary. She drew inspiration from tree bark, paper cut-outs and funeral shrouds, among other things.

In preparation for her work on Hamnet, Turzańska studied classical Elizabethan painting, as well as canvases by artists such as the Flemish Baroque master Sebastian Vrancx. She combined historical authenticity with her own imagination to create costumes that express the truth of the film's characters. In 2026, Turzańska was nominated for an Oscar for Best Costume Design for her work on the film.

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