Leo and Diane Dillon were an award-winning, husband-and-wife team of illustrators, famous for their covers for science fiction and fantasy books in the 1970s and 1980s. They were also prolific children's book illustrators and authors. They broke barriers in the American illustration world, with Leo being the first Black man to win a Caldecott Medal and Diane the first woman – and the only until 2014 - to receive a Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist. They met at the Parsons School of Design in the mid 1950s, where they were rival illustrators for a year before falling in love and marrying in 1957. Their joint career spanned over 50 years before Leo’s death in 2012; Diane Dillon continues to work as an illustrator in New York.