Colleen Atwood (born September 25, 1948) is an American costume designer. Atwood has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Costume Design nine times and won Academy Awards for the movies Chicago in 2002, Memoirs of a Geisha in 2006, and Alice in Wonderland in 2011. Atwood has collaborated several times with directors Tim Burton, Rob Marshall and Jonathan Demme. Born in Yakima, Washington, she studied painting at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington in the early 1970s, and later worked in retail at various places, including the Yves St. Laurent boutique at Frederick & Nelson department store in the city. Atwood began her career as a fashion advisor in Washington State in the early 1970s. She moved to New York in 1980, where she studied art at New York University. Her movie career started after a chance encounter with someone whose mother was designing the sets for the film Ragtime, and she got the job of a PA (production assistant) in the film. She worked as an assistant to a costume designer and eventually earned her first film credit for A Little Sex, directed by Bruce Paltrow.