Barbara Ling was an American production designer whose four-decade career ran from experimental Los Angeles theater lighting to some of the most recognizable sets in modern Hollywood. She won the Academy Award for Best Production Design in 2020, shared with set decorator Nancy Haigh, for re-creating 1969 Los Angeles almost entirely in camera for Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
She was born Barbara Claire Ling on 4 August 1952 in Santa Monica, California, the youngest of six children of Beatrice and Eugene Ling. Her father was an award-winning screenwriter and producer who co-wrote the Oscar-winning 1944 wartime documentary The Fighting Lady and wrote Lost Boundaries, which won the screenplay prize at the 1949 Cannes Film Festival. When Barbara was three, the family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where her father worked for her maternal grandfather's chain of movie theaters, and summers were spent at a family lake house in Eagle River. About five years later the Lings returned to California and settled in Pacific Palisades, where she grew up reading comic books and horror novels, keeping dogs, watching double features at the Bay Theater and hanging around the sets when her father filmed in the neighborhood.
She attended Corpus Christi Grade School, Marymount High School and Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy, where drama clubs gave her a love of live theater and staging. In 1970 she enrolled at Immaculate Heart College in Hollywood, majoring in art and theater and taking up photography. After a summer spent hitchhiking and riding trains around Europe, she moved into a loft in downtown Los Angeles at a time when few artists lived there.
Ling built her early career in lighting and set design, eventually working on more than 200 theater, opera and musical productions. In 1979 her lighting for Kid Twist and The Vienna Notes at the Mark Taper Forum's New Theatre for Now series earned Drama-Logue Awards. In 1981 she created the original lighting for The Pee-Wee Herman Show at the Groundlings Theatre, a production that moved to the Roxy and became an HBO special. She also designed Robert Altman's Off-Broadway Two by South and Tom Eyen's Women Behind Bars, and lit parts of a David Byrne concert tour. Byrne then asked her to design his directorial debut, True Stories (1986), which launched her film career.
Over the following decades she designed more than 20 features. They included Making Mr. Right, Diane Keaton's documentary Heaven and Less Than Zero (all 1987), Men Don't Leave (1990), and three 1991 releases: Oliver Stone's The Doors, V.I. Warshawski and Fried Green Tomatoes, on which she was also an associate producer. For Joel Schumacher she designed the present-day Los Angeles of Falling Down (1993) and then the neon Gotham City of Batman Forever (1995) and Batman & Robin (1997). She went on to Sydney Pollack's Random Hearts (1999), four films with Scott Hicks (Hearts in Atlantis, No Reservations, The Lucky One and Fallen) and Marc Forster's A Man Called Otto (2022). She also designed many commercials, including PBS, Guinness, Budweiser, Pepsi and United Airlines campaigns.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) became her signature achievement. Working from a tight prep period, she rebuilt period facades, marquees and signage along Hollywood Boulevard and in Westwood so that Tarantino could shoot real streets rather than green screen. The film brought her the Oscar, an Art Directors Guild Award and a Critics' Choice Award, plus BAFTA and Satellite nominations. Backstage at the Oscars she used the moment to argue for preserving old Los Angeles buildings.
In her personal life Ling shared about 26 years with commercial and film producer Lindsay Skutch, whom she met through work in the early 2000s and who became her wife. She helped raise Lindsay's sons, Will and Clay. She loved animals, adopted many rescue dogs and was remembered by colleagues as kind, funny and tenacious.
Her final project was Antoine Fuqua's Michael Jackson biopic Michael, released in April 2026. Barbara Ling died on 9 July 2026 in Santa Barbara, California, aged 73, after a battle with cancer, which her family's obituary described as lung cancer. Her death was announced by her agency WME. She was predeceased by her parents and her brothers Michael and David, and is survived by her wife, Lindsay, Will and Clay, and her siblings Bettina, John and James Ling. Her family asked that memorial gifts go to the Cancer Research Institute or a Los Angeles animal rescue.
lit a candle 7h ago
From social media
5Posts by Barbara, and posts about them, kept here so they are not lost.