Tania Ribalow is a two-time Emmy-nominated makeup artist. Her film credits include Joker, The Irishman, and The Greatest Showman. She is also known as the wife of actor Joseph Sikora, star of the Starz series Power Book IV: Force. The two met on the set of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. Ribalow worked in the makeup department there, and Sikora appeared in the pilot episode.
Ribalow’s career predates her marriage by roughly two decades. She worked steadily through the 2010s across some of prestige television’s biggest showcases — Showtime, HBO, Cinemax, AMC. She built a reputation as a dependable department head first, then moved into high-profile film work later in the decade. That run peaked in 2019 and 2020. She picked up credits on three acclaimed films in a single year, and one of them earned her a Make-Up Artists & Hair Stylists Guild Award.
Most fan sites repeat the same unsourced paragraphs about her story. This profile takes a different approach. It draws career details from her verified IMDb credit history and contemporaneous trade coverage instead.
A note on sourcing: much of what circulates online about Ribalow’s personal life comes from unverified entertainment blogs. These often contradict each other on her wedding date, her private family, and quotes attributed to Sikora. This profile sticks to what her professional record and credible trade reporting can confirm. It flags any detail that is only “reported” rather than confirmed.
Quick Facts
| Category | Details |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Tania Ribalow |
| Profession | Key Makeup Artist / Makeup Department Head |
| Born | Linden, New Jersey, USA |
| Spouse | Joseph Sikora (reportedly married 2014) |
| Notable Film Credits | Joker (2019), The Irishman (2019), The Kitchen (2019), The Greatest Showman (2017), Get Smart (2008) |
| Notable TV Credits | Boardwalk Empire, Nurse Jackie, Hostages, The Knick, Vinyl, Feed the Beast, Tommy |
| Awards | Make-Up Artists & Hair Stylists Guild Award — Best Period and/or Character Makeup, Joker (2020) |
| Nominations | Two Primetime Emmy nominations — Outstanding Makeup for a Single-Camera Series (Non-Prosthetic), for The Knick and Vinyl (2016) |
Career
Ribalow has worked in the makeup department on well over a dozen film and television productions since the late 2000s. She moved between key-artist roles and department-head positions as her resume grew.
Early and Television Work
Her earlier film credits include Get Smart (2008), Motherhood (2009), and Every Day (2010). She also worked on HBO’s Bored to Death, first as an assistant makeup artist in 2009, then as makeup department head in 2011.
The 2012–2014 stretch marks her longest sustained television run. She served as department head makeup on Showtime’s Nurse Jackie for 20 episodes (2012–2013). She then became head makeup artist on the CBS drama Hostages for 11 episodes (2013–2014). During this same period, she was part of the makeup team on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire — the show where she met Joseph Sikora.
She continued into single-episode and short-run television work later in the decade. These credits include The Knick (2015), Vinyl (2016), Feed the Beast (2016), and Tommy (2020). Each one added to her list of makeup-department work on prestige cable and streaming dramas.
Film Work and 2019 Breakout
On film, Ribalow’s credits include New Year’s Eve (2011), Too Big to Fail (2011), Side Effects (2013), The Only Living Boy in New York (2017), and The Greatest Showman (2017). Her biggest stretch came in 2019. She worked as key makeup artist on three films that year, and all three factored into that year’s awards conversation: The Kitchen, The Irishman, and Joker.
Awards and Recognition
Ribalow’s work on Joker (2019) earned her a Make-Up Artists & Hair Stylists Guild Award for Best Period and/or Character Makeup. She shared the win with Nicki Ledermann and Sunday Englis. Variety reported the win as part of a wider sweep for the film’s hair and makeup team at the guild’s 2020 nominations announcement. Ledermann, the film’s makeup department head, had also won an Emmy earlier for her work on Boardwalk Empire — the same production where Ribalow and Sikora first met.
Ribalow has also received two Primetime Emmy nominations, both in 2016, for Outstanding Makeup for a Single-Camera Series (Non-Prosthetic). One nomination came for the Knick episode “Whiplash.” The other came for the pilot episode of Vinyl. She has not won an Emmy. Fellow Joker makeup artist Sunday Englis had, by that film’s Guild nomination, become a three-time Emmy contender for those same two shows — a sign of how tightly-knit the era’s top television makeup teams were.
How Did Joseph Sikora and Tania Ribalow Meet?
Sikora and Ribalow met on the set of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire (2010–2014). Ribalow worked as part of the show’s makeup team. Sikora appeared in the series, including its pilot episode, which Martin Scorsese directed. Scorsese’s long-time makeup department head, Nicki Ledermann, later worked alongside Ribalow on Joker — nearly a decade after that pilot. It’s a small illustration of how insular the top tier of film and TV makeup work can be. The same handful of names tend to cycle through the same prestige productions across different years and studios.
Reports say the couple married in 2014. The date and details of the ceremony have never come out publicly, and the marriage itself wasn’t public knowledge until Sikora referenced his wife on social media in 2018. Beyond that, the couple has kept their relationship largely private. They rarely appear together publicly, and no reliable public information confirms whether they have children.
The couple has confirmed very little on the record. Other personal details that circulate across fan and entertainment sites — wedding specifics, quotes attributed to Sikora in interviews, details about their day-to-day life — should be treated as unverified rather than fact. Earlier drafts of this kind of profile lean on those claims. This one leaves them out instead of repeating them as settled.
Why Her Career Stands on Its Own
Ribalow’s Guild Award and two Emmy nominations reflect recognition from her industry peers, independent of her marriage. Her credits span prestige HBO and Showtime dramas to award-contending films like Joker and The Irishman. That work rarely gets public attention, but it shapes how audiences see the characters on screen.
It’s also work built on longevity, not a single breakout moment. She built more than a decade of steady department-head and key-artist credits across broadcast, cable, and film before the awards recognition arrived. She ground through episodic television work first, then landed high-profile film credits. That’s a fairly typical career shape in the makeup industry — even if it’s rarely what gets written about when a story frames a person primarily around a famous spouse.
Conclusion
Strip away the “celebrity wife” framing that most articles reach for, and a straightforward, well-documented career remains. Ribalow spent over a decade earning makeup department credits on some of American television’s most acclaimed dramas. A run of high-profile film work in 2019 followed, and it culminated in a Guild Award. Two Emmy nominations along the way confirm that recognition came from her peers, not from her marriage.
Her connection to Joseph Sikora is real, and it traces back to a specific set and a specific show. But it’s a much smaller part of the record than most existing coverage suggests. The couple’s own reticence about their private life says something too: neither has built a public persona around the relationship. This profile follows their lead instead of filling the silence with unsourced detail. Ribalow’s professional record is what’s actually verifiable — and that record stands on its own.
