Production designer, art director, and costume designer Kristi Zea worked on a number of major films of the '80s and '90s that include Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs (1991), Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990), James L. Brooks' Broadcast News (1987), and Jon Avnet's The War (1994). Following an education at Vermont's Middlebury College and receiving an English degree from Columbia, Zea became a costume designer for filmmaker Alan Parker on four of his films, and in 1987, she functioned as an art director on Parker's Angel Heart.