Nikki Di Falco
Nikki Di Falco completed a Bachelor of Design at UNSW Art & Design. She then returned to study more than ten years later to complete her Design Honours at UNSW Art & Design.
Storyboard illustration is a special art form that requires the ability to work visually, laterally, and quickly. Storyboard illustrators take into account the demands of screenwriters, directors, producers, and other creatives. They need to tell a compelling story in a manner that is film literate, delivering high quality layouts, compositions, and sequential drawings. And if they are working on a major blockbuster, storyboard artists need to be able to deliver under extraordinary pressure.
UNSW Art & Design graduate, Nikki Di Falco, is doing all of the above. Since completing her undergraduate degree in design in the late 1990s, she’s been active in the feature film industry, television commercials, and television live action.
Nikki’s been the storyboard artist for The Great Gatsby (starring Leonardo Di Caprio and directed by Baz Luhrmann), Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Juliet (both directed by Baz Luhrmann), Oscar and Lucinda (directed by Gillian Armstrong), and more recently, Truth (starring Kate Blanchett and Robert Redford and directed by James Vanderbilt).
For television commercials, she’s been the storyboard artist for Chanel No.5 and Tourism Australia (both directed by Baz Luhrmann) and she’s applied these same skills to three episodes of the ABC2 children’s program, Hoopla Doopla!
After teaching at UNSW Art & Design for five years on contemporary art, design, drawing, and approaches to visualisation, Nikki has relocated to Los Angeles, California. She’s working as a freelancer to the Hollywood movie industry and as an educator at The Getty Centre where she provides overviews to visitors about art, architecture, gardens, and methods of staging art within the Sketching Gallery.