Joseph Sikora’s wife is Tania Ribalow, a makeup artist who had already spent a decade working in film and television by the time the two of them met. That was 2010, on the pilot of Boardwalk Empire, directed by Martin Scorsese. She was in the makeup department. He had a small part in the same episode, a jobbing actor out of Chicago who had just come off a minor role in Shutter Island.
Ribalow was born in New Jersey in 1973 and is 53. She and Sikora have been together for sixteen years. Neither of them has spoken publicly about children, and there is no public record of any.
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The films and television Tania Ribalow has worked on
Her credits reach back to a 2000 adaptation of Hamlet, and the run since has barely paused: Super Troopers, Roger Dodger, Get Smart, Side Effects, The Greatest Showman, The Kitchen, The Many Saints of Newark, Sharper. On most of the recent work her IMDb page lists her as key makeup artist or department head, both senior roles. She headed makeup on Nurse Jackie across 2012 and 2013, and later on Feed the Beast.
The two people tend to recognise are Joker and The Irishman. She was key makeup artist on both. The Irishman put her on set with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci, in a film built around ageing three of them across several decades.
The awards came in 2016, when she picked up two Primetime Emmy nominations in the same category, Outstanding Makeup for a Single-Camera Series, one for an episode of The Knick and one for the pilot of Vinyl. She also shared a Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild Award for Joker with Nicki Ledermann and Sunday Englis.
Where both of them came from
Ribalow was born in Linden, New Jersey, and is American. The Russian side of the family is her father’s. Wasily Ribalow grew up in Orel, served in the Russian army as a young man, and reached the United States in 1951. He spent the rest of his working life as a steelworker in New Jersey.
Sikora grew up on the far northwest side of Chicago, in a neighbourhood he has described as police officers, firefighters and city workers, and assumed for years that he would end up in one of those jobs himself. He started acting at eleven. By 1988 he was in the Screen Actors Guild, and money his parents put aside from his early commercial work paid part of his way through college.
The rule she had about dating actors
In a 2023 video for GQ, Sikora went through the objects he keeps. One of them was a thank you card from Scorsese, sent after the Boardwalk Empire shoot. The day that card arrived, he said, was the day he met “the woman who would become my wife”.
Getting her to agree to a date took a good deal longer. Speaking to The Untitled Magazine in December 2012, he said she had a policy of not dating actors she worked with and held to it for a couple of years, while friends who had worked with him since kept telling her to pick up the phone. She never did. The person who eventually introduced them properly was Nicki Ledermann, who was running the makeup department Ribalow worked in at the time.
The engagement, and the audition he missed
By the end of 2012 the two of them were engaged, and neither announced it. It surfaces in the obituary for Ribalow’s father, who died that December, which lists among his survivors his daughter Tania and her fiancรฉ, Joseph Sikora.
Sikora’s account of the months that followed is bleaker than most origin stories. Speaking to Big Boy’s Neighborhood in January 2020, he described spending a month in a friend’s garage in Los Angeles during pilot season, with no plumbing, about seven years earlier. He was 36, and roughly twenty six years into acting.
In the same interview he said he skipped the first round of auditions for the Starz drama that became Power, because he was getting married. Another actor had been attached to the part before him. Once Omari Hardwick was cast as Ghost, casting reopened, and Sikora auditioned five times for Tommy Egan before he got it. Starz confirmed him in October 2013.
No wedding date has ever been made public. A 2014 date circulates widely, though it sits awkwardly with his own account, since the wedding he describes clashed with auditions for a part that was cast in October 2013.
The conversation that sent him to therapy
Sikora has been open about his temper. He boxed as an amateur from the age of seventeen and was still getting into fights in his thirties. The anger, he worked out later, was fear based, and he had spent years holding other people responsible for his own situation.
What changed it was his girlfriend at the time telling him she would not stay in the relationship unless he went to therapy. He went, and was still going when he talked about it publicly years later. He has said that finding her was the first time he had “found something that I loved more than acting”, and that the work started arriving after that.
Why they have never been photographed together
Sikora has 2.9 million followers on Instagram and discusses his wife in interviews, yet there is no known photograph of the pair taken by a press photographer, at a premiere or anywhere else. Outlets covering the marriage tend to run the same picture, and it comes from the personal Instagram account of Stephen Wallem, an actor who was on Nurse Jackie during the years Ribalow ran its makeup department.
Part of that is simply the job. Makeup department heads work on the other side of the camera and have little reason to be in front of one. Sikora has also said that when people approach him while the two of them are out together, she reminds him they are on a date.
She has never given an interview about the marriage and has no public social media. Everything on the record about the relationship has come from him.
Her absence has caused some confusion about who Sikora is married to. Tasha St. Patrick, who comes up often alongside his name, is a character on Power played by Naturi Naughton, and she is married on screen to Ghost rather than to Tommy Egan.
What both of them are doing now
Power Book IV: Force has finished its third and final season, ending Sikora’s run as Tommy Egan after more than a decade, though he has said he would play the character again if the writing came along. He produced the show’s second and third seasons, his first credits as a producer, and has set up a company called Black Fox Productions with his brother, Albin.
Ribalow has eight episodes of the series American Classic on her 2026 credits, and did Susan Sarandon’s makeup on the film Nonnas the year before that.
