Who Is Actually in the Art Department, and Who You Hire First

What is the art department?

The art department is responsible for everything in frame that is not a person: sets, dressing, props, graphics, vehicles as they appear on camera, and the visual logic that holds them together. In the United States it is not one department at all. It is two union jurisdictions that share a name in conversation and almost nothing on a call sheet.

Getting that split right is the whole of this article, because hiring order, budget structure and half the arguments on a production all fall out of it.

Two locals, one department

The design side is the Art Directors Guild, IATSE Local 800 — about 3,300 members working as Production Designers, Art Directors, Scenic, Title and Graphic Artists, Set Designers and Model Makers, Illustrators, Matte Artists and Previs Artists. These are the people who decide what a space is and draw it so it can be built.

The dressing and property side is Affiliated Property Craftspersons, IATSE Local 44 — over 5,000 members across crafts including Coordinator, Drapery, Floorcovering, Greens, Propmaster, Propmaker, Property, Sewers, Set Decorator, Special Effects and Upholsterer, with jurisdiction over features, single- and multi-camera episodic television, streaming series, commercials and music videos. These are the people who put objects in the room and make the room look lived in.

The everyday test: if it is attached, it is art department; if it can be picked up or carried out, it is set decoration or props. That is a rule of thumb, not a contract clause, and productions argue about the edges of it constantly — but it resolves most of them.

Who do you hire first?

The order follows the drawings, because nothing downstream can start without them.

1. Production designer. Before locations lock, if the schedule allows it. A designer brought in after locations are committed is being asked to design around decisions they should have been part of.
2. Art director. As soon as there is a concept to execute. On a small production this is the same person; the moment there is construction, it stops being.
3. Set decorator and property master, in parallel. Both need lead time for sourcing, and both will tell you that the shopping is longer than the dressing.
4. Set designers, illustrators, previs. Hired against specific needs — a build, a sequence, a visual effect handoff.
5. The crews. Lead person and dressers under the decorator; assistant props under the master; construction under the art director.

The cost of getting the order wrong is not abstract. Hire a set decorator before a designer and you pay a skilled person to wait for a brief. Hire an art director with no designer and you get execution of a concept nobody has approved, which is a reshoot argument in slow motion.

This is the specific shape of a general problem we have written about before: productions do not hire one person, they crew a department, and the sequence inside the department is load-bearing.

The budgeting mistake worth naming

Set decoration is not a sub-line of art department. It is a department: its own crew, its own buying and rental budget, its own truck, its own strike. Folding it into an art department total produces a number that looks disciplined in a top sheet and comes apart in week two, because the decorator's purchase orders were never in it.

The same is true of props. A property master on a picture with weapons, food, or anything an actor has to use repeatedly is running a sourcing and continuity operation, not drawing against the art department's petty cash.

If you are building the numbers from scratch, treat each as its own block in the film budget template and list their elements separately on the script breakdown sheet — which is where the distinction has to be visible if it is going to survive into the schedule.

What this does not cover

Everything above describes Los Angeles union structure, and it describes it as of 2026. IATSE local jurisdictions vary by region: the craft split in Georgia, New York, the UK or India is not identical, and on a non-union production it does not exist at all — one person may carry the designer, art director and decorator titles at once and nobody will blink.

The membership figures are the guilds' own published counts and describe who holds a card, not how many people are working at any given moment. In a contracting market those diverge, and 2026 is a contracting market.

What travels is the logic underneath, not the local numbers: design precedes execution, execution precedes dressing, and dressing has its own money. Productions that respect that sequence spend less than productions that discover it.