Biography
Richard Toyon is a production designer and art director. He graduated in landscape architecture from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo in 1982, after six years as a firefighter and ranger with the U.S. Forest Service. He later designed sets for the improv troupe The Groundlings and worked as a landscape architect at Steven Spielberg’s residence, where Spielberg encouraged him to enter production design; Toyon subsequently took classes at UCLA.
His first production-design credit was the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. Toyon served as production designer on the HBO comedy series Silicon Valley (2014–2019) and won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Production Design for a Narrative Program (Half-Hour or Less) in 2015; he received additional nominations for the same series. Other credits include production design on American Pie 2 (2001), Always Be My Maybe (2019), Dead to Me (2019), Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty (2022–2023) and Rez Ball (2024), and earlier art-direction work on films such as Liar Liar (1997) and A Time to Kill (1996). He is of Juaneño (Acjachemen) descent and has contributed to projects centred on Native American stories.
