(some women filmmakers)
Maren Ade
German producer, screenwriter, and director mostly known for her 2016 film Toni Erdmann. Ade also produced Valeska Grisebach's stunning film Western (2017).
Chantal Akerman
Belgian director whom many will claim as their favorite director (myself included). Akerman transformed time so beautifully with her 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, that it was impossible to not look at any other film without referencing it. Other essential films are Les Années 80 (1983), Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (1978), Je Tu Il Elle (1974), Saute ma Ville (1968), and News from Home (1977). Sadly in 2015 Akerman took her life at the age of 65.
Allison Anders
American independent director known for her 90s films Gas Food Lodging (1992), Mi Vida Loca (1993), and Grace of My Heart (1996). She was also a production assistant on Paris, Texas.
Kamila Andini
Indonesian director known for her debut film The Mirror Never Lies (2011).
Maya Angelou
The poet's one feature film: Down in the Delta (1998) on motherhood and dipsomania.
Gillian Armstrong
Australian director, known for My Brilliant Career (1979), Little Women (1994), and Oscar and Lucinda (1997).
Andrea Arnold
Brilliant English filmmaker and former actor Andrea Arnold, her immensely impressive filmography includes the films Wasp (2003), Red Road (2006), Fish Tank (2009), Wuthering Heights (2011), American Honey (2016), episodes of I Love Dick (2017), and the 2021 documentary Cow which is a portrait of a dairy-farm cow’s life span.
Dorothy Arzner
American Hollywood director making films from the 1920s into the early 1940s.
Lila Avilés
Mexican director, screenwriter, and producer known for her 2018 film The Chambermaid.
Ilisa Barbash
Barbash is the curator of visual anthropology at Harvard’s Peabody Museum. She co-directed and co-produced In and Out of Africa (1992), P.O.V. (2011) and the documentary masterpiece Sweetgrass (2009) that follows modern-day shepherds leading their sheep up into Montana's Absaroka-Beartooth mountains.
Corinna Belz
German filmmaker who directed the wonderful portrait of the artists Gerhard Richter Painting (2011), and Peter Handke: In the Woods, Might be Late (2016).
Sadie Benning
Born 1973 in Milwaukee, and daughter of James Benning. Benning is known for experimenting with the moving image as a child with a Fisher-Price Pixelvision PXL-2000 toy camera. She also co founded the band Le Tigre.
Ann Biderman
American film and television writer known for the intense portrait of Los Angeles police officers Southland (2009-2013).
Susanne Bier
Danish film director, screenwriter, and producer. Bier directed After the Wedding (2006) with Mads Mikkelsen, and The Night Manager (2016) with Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie.
Kathryn Bigelow
Hugely talented American director, responsible for many classics such as the outlaw biker film The Loveless (1981) with Willem Dafoe and musician Robert Gordon, the uncomfortable neo-western/vampire film Near Dark (1987) with Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton, and the gritty 90s classic surf/bank robbery film Point Break (1991). Not without interest are Strange Days (1995), and The Hurt Locker (2008).
Lizzie Borden
Not the tried and acquitted axe murderer, but the American filmmaker who directed Working Girls (1986) focussing on the life of several prostitutes in a Manhattan brothel, and the documentary-style feminist fiction film Born in Flames (1983).
Catherine Breillat
Not for everyone, the French director who's 2001 film Fat Girl is an alternative coming-of-age film with two sisters Anaïs Pingot and Elena Pingot, perhaps inspired by Anaïs Nin?
Mary Ellen Bute
Pioneer American animator mastering the concept of visual music. The Houston born filmmaker made fourteen abstract films between the 1930s to the 1950s set to classical music. I was fortunate to be initiated to her work at the 1995 Harvard Film Archive show Articulated Light: The Emergence of Abstract Film in America curated by Bruce Posner and presented by Cecile Starr.
Jane Campion
New Zealand director, screenwriter, and producer, and the first female filmmaker to receive the Palme d'Or for her 1993 film The Piano. As a high school kid seeing The Piano on the big screen was completely overwhelming and still resonates within me. Her films Sweetie (1989), An Angel at My Table (1990), Holy Smoke! (1998), In the Cut (2003), Bright Star (2009), the television show Top of the Lake (2013), and Power of the Dog (2021), are all monumental works.
Niki Caro
New Zealand director and screenwriter responsible for the 2002 film Whale Rider.
Xan (Alexandra) Cassavetes
Daughter of Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes. Her 2002 film Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession is essential to anyone interested in the history of film as art and its reception in the United States.
Liliana Cavani
Italian director who made the insane 1974 film The Night Porter.
Lisa Cholodenko
American screenwriter and director. Cholodenko wrote and directed the films High Art (1998), Laurel Canyon (2002), The Kids Are All Right (2010), the HBO four-part mini-series Olive Kitteridge, the first three episodes of Netflix's Unbelievable (2019), and several episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street and Six Feet Under.
Chinonye Chukwu
Nigerian-American film director best known for the 2019 film Clemency with Alfre Woodard.
Christina Choe
American director, made Nancy in 2018 starring Andrea Riseborough.
Věra Chytilová
Avant-garde Czech film director best known for her 1966 Czech New Wave film Daisies.
Shirley Clarke
Seeing Shirley Clarke's 1963 film The Cool World in college was a huge event for this film enthusiast, and it is strange to have never heard mention of the masterpiece since then. The film follows the Royal Pythons, a youth gang in Harlem, specifically a 15 year-old gangster Duke (Hampton Clanton), and a racketeer named Priest (Carl Lee). The music is by Mal Waldron and The Dizzy Gillespie quintet. Clarke also made the film version of the 1959 New York City's Living Theater group play The Connection by Jack Gelber, initially with Jackie McLean, Freddie Redd, Cecil Taylor, Warren Finnerty, and Carl Lee, many of whom appear in Clarke's film. She also directed Skyscraper (1959), Portrait of Jason (1967), and Ornette: Made in America (1985).
Maya Daren
Towering figure in the early New York City avant'garde film scene, hanging out with Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, John Cage, and Anaïs Nin, Deren influenced countless filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Curtis Harrington, Kenneth Anger, and Carolee Schneemann. She had creative partnerships with two husbands Alexander Hammid (Meshes in the Afternoon and Ritual in Transfigured Time, The Private Life of a Cat) and later Teiji Itō whom did music for Meshes of the Afternoon and Meditation on Violence. Other essential films include At Land (1944), A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), and Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Her contributions to the history of experimental/avant'garde cinema are beyond essential.
Julie Dash
One of the filmmakers in the L.A. Rebellion group, known for her films Four Women (1975), Illusions (1982), and Daughters of the Dust (1991).
Storm de Hirsch
Pioneer 1960s New York City avant'garde filmmaker and poet, one of the founding members of the Film-Makers' Cooperative and early editor of Film Culture magazine; Storm de Hirsch is known for her frame-by-frame etching and painting and metadiagetic editing.
Claire Denis
French filmmaker known for her films I Can't Sleep (1994), Beau Travail (1999), Trouble Every Day (2001), Friday Night (2002), 35 Shots of Rum (2008), White Material (2009), Les Salauds (2013), High Life (2018) and Fire (2022). Memorably scored by the English band Tindersticks.
Mati Diop
French/Senegalese filmmaker and actress who starred in Claire Denis' film 35 Shots of Rum (2008). Diop went on to direct the stunning 2019 supernatural romantic drama Atlantics (Atlantique) which competed for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
Evelina Domnitch
Along with Dmitry Gelfand, Evelina Domnitch explores visual and invisible phenomena through the moving image and installations.
Julia Ducournau
French film director and screenwriter. Her crazy as f*ck virtuosic, sensitive, and deranged film Titane won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
Germaine Dulac
French filmmaker, film theorist, journalist and critic known for the 1928 film The Seashell and the Clergyman.
Cheryl Dunye
Dunye's The Watermelon Woman was the first gay African-American female filmmaker's feature film.
Ava DuVernay
California filmmaker, directed Middle of Nowhere (2012), Selma (2014) and When They See Us (2019).
Nora Ephron
NYC Romcom director known for writing Silkwood (1983), Heartburn (1986), When Harry Met Sally... (1989) and directing Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You've Got Mail (1998). Growing up hating the genre, they are actually not bad films when you watch them.
Valie Export
I still remember as a college student the pain and transcendence experienced while watching Export's 1973 film Remote, Remote, where she cuts her cuticles and dips her bloodied hand in a bowl of milk. The Austrian artist and filmmaker is best known for her public performances, expanded cinema work, video installations, computer animations, photography, and sculpture. Memorable is Export's TAP and TOUCH Cinema where her naked chest is obscured with a mini makeshift ‘movie theatre’, and passers by are challenged to engage with her cinema.
Valerie Faris
Music video director team Valerie Faris and her husband Jonathan Dayton co-directed the 2006 feature film Little Miss Sunshine.
Sophie Fiennes
English film director and producer, the sister of actors Ralph and Joseph Fiennes. Fiennes produced and directed the documentary The Pervert's Guide to Cinema and The Pervert's Guide to Ideology with the philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek. Her 2010 documentary on Anselm Kiefer Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow focuses on Kiefer's site specific work at his abandoned factory complex outside Barjac France.
Greta Gerwig
American actress and director from Sacramento California, after starring in Noah Baumbach's Greenberg (2010) and Frances Ha (2012), Gerwig directed the lovely film Lady Bird (2017) on growing up in the early aughts in Sacramento.
Bette Gordon
American director, made the gritty film Variety (1983), and the experimental film I-94 (1974) with James Benning.
Marleen Gorris
Dutch writer and director, her 1995 film Antonia's Line won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
Debra Granik
Cambridge Massachusetts born director best known for her films Down to the Bone (2004) and Winter's Bone (2010).
Nancy Graves
American sculptor, painter, printmaker, and filmmaker. Her 1970 film Izy Boukir documents camels in the Sahara. The 1973 film Aves: Magnificent Frigate Bird, Great Flamingo is a multilayered motion study of overlapping forms in flight. The 1974 Reflections on the Moon is a black and white abstraction showing the passage of a camera over a static surface comprised of 200 stills of lunar surface.
Valeska Grisebach
German director and part of the Berlin School of filmmaking, who's film Western (2017) is shockingly original and has a kick like a mule.
Alice Guy-Blaché
French pioneer filmmaker working from 1896 to 1920.
Lucile Hadžihalilović
French writer and director whom grew up in Morocco. Her films include the 2004 mystery drama Innocence, the 2015 water focused horror/thriller Evolution, and editing for many films including Gaspar Noé's I Stand Alone (1998).
Mary Harron
Canadian filmmaker and screenwriter, directed the indie hits I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) and American Psycho (2000).
Amy Heckerling
American filmmaker known for the classic 80s films Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), National Lampoon's European Vacation (1985), and the 1995 film Clueless.
Marielle Heller
American writer, director, and actress best known for directing the films The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015), Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018), and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019). Her acting in The Queen’s Gambit (2020) really gives an extra push to an already solid show.
Eliza Hittman
New York City screenwriter, film director, and producer. The Brooklyn based film Beach Rats (2017) about a high school boy dangerously hooking up with older men via the internet was definitely interesting, but the 2020 film Never Rarely Sometimes Always about a young girl traveling to the big city (Manhattan and Brooklyn) to get an abortion is a modern day classic worthy of many rewatches and close study.
Joanna Hogg
British film director and screenwriter. In the late 1970s Hogg worked as a photographer and made experimental super-8 films after borrowing a camera from her mentor Derek Jarman. Her feature films include her debut Unrelated (2007), Archipelago (2010), Exhibition (2013), and the sublime duo The Souvenir (2019) and The Souvenir Part II (2021).
Amy Holden Jones
American screenwriter, editor and film director. In addition to directing the memorable film Love Letters (1983) starring Jamie Lee Curtis and James Keach, Jones edited American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince (1978), and wrote Mystic Pizza (1988).
Agnieszka Holland
Polish film and television director and screenwriter. Holland was initially an assistant to directors Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda, and then emigrated to France. Her works include the historic war drama Europa Europa (1990), the fantasy drama The Secret Garden (1993), three episodes of the heaviest of television shows The Wire (2004, 2006, and 2008), three episodes of the Seattle crime drama The Killing (2011 and 2012), three episodes of House of Cards (2015 and 2017), and the truly strange and mysterious 2017 Polish crime film Spoor, which is a film that has not left my head since seeing it.
Nancy Holt
American artist whom made films related to Land Art, her own and work by Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer. The films include Mono Lake (1968), East Coast, West Coast (1969), Swamp (1971), Sun Tunnels (1978), and was the cinematographer for Robert Smithson's film Spiral Jetty (1970).
Ágnes Hranitzky
Hungarian film editor and director whom co-directed The Man From London and The Turin Horse with her spouse Béla Tarr.
Sophie Huber
Swiss actress and director, known for her documentary Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction (2012).
Ann Hui
Hong Kong New Wave film director, producer, screenwriter and actress. Known for her Vietnam Trilogy including Below the Lion Rock (1978), The Story of Woo Viet (1981), and Boat People (1983).
Courtney Hunt
American director and screenwriter who directed the stunning debut feature film Frozen River 2008 starring Melissa Leo.
Patty Jenkins
American film director, screenwriter, and producer who's debut film Monster (2003) on serial killer Aileen Wuornos stars Charlize Theron and Christina Ricci.
Tamara Jenkins
American filmmaker known for her feature films The Savages (2007) with Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Private Life (2018) with Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn.
Gloria Katz
American director, screenwriter and film producer. Most notably Katz co-directed the 1973 supernatural horror film Messiah of Evil with her husband Willard Huyck. The film takes place in the California beach town of Point Dume, same place where Treehorn’s beach party in The Big Lebowski was filmed, and many scenes from Planet of the Apes. Katz also wrote the screenplays for American Graffiti (1973) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). Katz and Huyck were also script doctors for Lucas, including his film Star Wars.
Marjorie Keller
New York experimental filmmaker, activist, author, and film scholar. Keller was a student of Stan Brakhage, and wrote the book The Untutored Eye: Childhood in the Films of Cocteau, Cornell and Brakhage, published in 1986. Her many films include Misconception (1977), Daughters of Chaos (1980), and Herein (1991).
Jennifer Kent
Australian actress, writer and director. Her debut film The Babadook (2014) and her second film The Nightingale (2018) are truly disturbing and one doesn't come away unscathed.
So Yong Kim
Korean American filmmaker known for In Between Days (2006), Treeless Mountain (2008), For Ellen (2012), and Lovesong (2016).
Barbara Kopple
American filmmaker known for her documentary Harlan County, USA (1976) on the 1973 Brookside Strike of 180 coal miners and their wives against the Duke Power Company-owned Eastover Coal Company's Brookside Mine and Prep Plant in Harlan County, southeast Kentucky.
Tamara Kotevska
Macedonian filmmaker, co-directed the 2019 documentary Honeyland with Ljubomir Stefanov which portrays the life of Hatidže Muratova, a beekeeper of wild bees who lives in the remote mountain village of Bekirlija.
Kasi Lemmons
American film director, screenwriter, and actress, known for Eve's Bayou (1997)
Helen Levitt
New York City photographer, director, editor and cinematographer. Levitt made the documentary In the Street (1948) with Janice Loeb and James Agee, a document of life on the streets of Spanish Harlem made with hidden 16mm film cameras.
Jeanne Liotta
American experimental filmmaker, born in Brooklyn in 1960.
Jennie Livingston
American director best known for the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning, which chronicles NYC Ball Culture.
Barbara Loden
American actress and director. Loden wrote, starred in, produced and director the 1970 masterpiece Wanda, a portrait of a wanderer who's actions veer toward the out of control. Loden left a strong mark as an actress in Splendor in the Grass (1961). Her scenes with Burt Lancaster in Frank Perry's The Swimmer (1968) were replaced by Janice Rule.
Rose Lowder
French-Peruvian avant-garde filmmaker, her films mostly deal with abstracting nature.
Mary Lucier
Pioneer video artist. Of particular note in Lucier's oeuvre is the video works from the 1970s where she focused the camera on the sun and burned the recording tube, seen in such works as Dawn Burn (1975), Paris Dawn Burn (1977) and Equinox (1979).
Ida Lupino
English-American actress, singer, director, and producer. Lupina worked in the periphery of 1950s Hollywood directing the film noir The Hitch-Hiker (1953) with Edmond O'Brien, William Talman and Frank Lovejoy. Also Not Wanted (1948), Never Fear (1950), Outrage (1950), The Bigamist (1953), and and uncredited on On Dangerous Ground 1951. As an actress, Lupina is most memorable in High Sierra (1941) with Humphrey Bogart.
Babette Mangolte
French cinematographer, film director, and photographer best known for her work with Chantal Akerman: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and News from Home (1977). Mangolte also documented performance works of choreographers like Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, David Gordon, and Yvonne Rainer. Mangold directed many films from 1973 to 2013.
Elaine May
American comedian, film director, screenwriter, playwright, and actress. In the 1950s May was in the influential improv comedy due with Mike Nichols; Nichols and May. Her directorial efforts include A New Leaf (1971) The Heartbreak Kid (1972) Mikey and Nicky (1976) and Ishtar (1987) with A New Leaf being one of the best films of the 1970s. In addition to her directed films, May wrote the screenplay for The Birdcage (1996), Heaven Can Wait (1978) and uncredited contribution to Tootsie (1982). As an actress May made quite an impression in Small Time Crooks (2000) and her own A New Leaf (1971).
Marie Menken
New York City experimental filmmaker and painter. Menken and her husband Willard Maas lived in a Brooklyn Heights apartment where they had an avant'garde circle of filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, and Andy Warhol. Menken was a huge influence on these artists. It is said that Menken and Maas' drunken fights were an influence on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. All of Menken's films are just stunning, perhaps a good place to start is Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (1961).
Rebecca Miller
American filmmaker and novelist. Her 2002 indie film Personal Velocity: Three Portraits focuses on three women who have reached a turning point in their lives, starring Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey, and Fairuza Balk.
Trinh T. Minh-ha
Born in Hanoi. Her first 16mm film, Reassemblage from 1983 was filmed in Senegal, picturing the dwellings and everyday life of the Sereer people and is a non-linear montage of sounds and visuals.
Jocelyn Moorhouse
Australian screenwriter, producer, and film director. Her 1991 debut film Proof stars Hugo Weaving, Geneviève Picot and Russell Crowe with Weaving as a blind photographer adverse to romance. Moorhouse also produced her husband P.J. Hogan's film Muriel's Wedding (1994) starring Toni Collette.
Mira Nair
Indian-American director known for Mississippi Masala (1991) and Monsoon Wedding (2001).
Gunvor Nelson
Swedish pioneer experimental filmmaker, most of her better known films made while she lived in the Bay Area in the mid 1960s and early 1970s. Some works include Schmeerguntz (1965 with Dorothy Wiley), the audiovisual masterpiece My Name Is Oona (1969), Take Off (1972), and the portrait of her dying mother Time Being (1991).
Marie Nyreröd
Swedish filmmaker know for her portrait of Ingmar Bergman and his home Bergman Island (2004).
Yoko Ono
Japanese Fluxus artist and singer/songwriter who made a number of Fluxfilms (aka Fluxus films) including One (1966), Eye Blink (1966), Four (1966), as well as other films, the most well known being Fly (1970).
Véréna Paravel
French anthropologist, filmmaker, and photographer. She works in the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University in Cambridge, USA, and in Paris, France. She co-directed Leviathan (2012), with Lucien Castaing-Taylor, the highly abstract film about the North American fishing industry.
Kimberly Peirce
American director known for her debut film Boys Don't Cry (1999) and the The Conceptual Fuck episode of I Love Dick (2017).
Sally Potter
English film director and screenwriter best known for directing Orlando (1992) with Tilda Swinton.
Charlotte Pryce
London born experimental filmmaker. I took an history of experimental film class with Pryce at SFAI that uncovered an alternative history of structural film focusing on lesser known artist investigating representations of nature interacting with a camera.
Yvonne Rainer
American minimalist dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker. Rainer made a number of films starting in the 70s that were part autobiography, fiction, soundworks and political.
Lynne Ramsay
Scottish film director, writer, producer, and cinematographer. Ramsay arrived on the scene with the gritty and sublime Ratcatcher (1999), followed by Morvern Callar (2002) with Samantha Morton exploring the darkness. Her abstraction Swimmer (2012), the abstract neo-noir psychological thriller film You Were Never Really Here (2017) with Joaquin Phoenix is clearly one of the best films of the decade.
Dee Rees
American screenwriter and director. Rees is known for her films Pariah (2011), Bessie (2015), Mudbound (2017), and The Last Thing He Wanted (2020). Pariah follows a 17-year-old Black teenager embracing her identity as a lesbian.
Kelly Reichardt
American director and screenwriter, born and raised in Miami Florida. Reichardt received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her films are described as part of a minimalist movement in film, but that doesn't quite come across to this viewer, her cinematic style is more a subtle relationship between a non-fiction vérité quality and good old fashioned story telling, low key but profound in a quiet way. Inspired by Todd Haynes' move to Portland OR, Reichardt started making films in Oregon like Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Meek's Cutoff (2010), Night Moves (2013), and First Cow (2019). Her film Certain Women (2016) was shot in Montana. One truly profound narrative from Reichardt appears in Certain Women with "the rancher" played by Lily Gladstone, making humble attempts at a relationship with the rather detached Kristen Stewart character by attending her lackluster classes and going to dinner with her. The unrequited love narrative sort of shocked this viewer in how something so quiet could have such an emotional effect.
Lotte Reiniger
German pioneer of silhouette animation.
Alice Rohrwacher
Italian film director, editor and screenwriter. Her film Happy as Lazzaro won the 2018 Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes Film Festival.
Barbara Rubin
New York City underground filmmaker Barbara Rubin's 1963/64 masterpiece Christmas on Earth is as important as any film Jack Smith or Jonas Mekas made. The orgiastic ritual film was inspired by Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell and made when Rubin was 17 years old. Rubin died at age 35 in 1980 after giving birth to her fifth child. She had left the avant'garde life of NYC to become an Hasidic Jew.
Joanna Sarsby
Director of David Attenborough's 1998 masterpiece The Life of Birds.
Nancy Savoca
New York City director initially a production assistant to John Sayles on his film The Brother From Another Planet, and as an assistant auditor for Jonathan Demme for his films Something Wild (1986), and Married to the Mob (1988). Her 1991 coming-of-age film Dogfight with Lili Taylor and River Phoenix starts as a tasteless game where Marines compete to score the ugliest date, and shifts into a beautiful love story.
Carolee Schneemann
Schneemann's 1967 film Fuses is a transcendent erotic masterpiece conceived as a cinematic experience shot through the eyes of her cat Kitch, memorably showing emotional love making between Schneemann and her partner James Tenney, nature abstractions and light moving through and shifting time. The 16mm film was then stained, burned, and directly drawing on for an experience that is as moving as it is sexual.
Céline Sciamma
French screenwriter and film director best known for her 2019 film Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Even more inspiring is her 2014 coming-of-age film Girlhood about Marieme (Karidja Touré), a teenage girl who lives in a rough neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris surrounded by a world full of intimidation and theft.
Susan Seidelman
American film director, producer, and writer. Seidelman directed Smithereens (1982) and Desperately Seeking Susan (1985).
Adrienne Shelly
American actress, film director and screenwriter. She made a big impact on the film scene through Hal Hartley's films The Unbelievable Truth (1989) and Trust (1990). Shelly directed, wrote, and starred in the 2007 film Waitress which was released a year after she was tragically murdered by a 19-year-old construction worker in her West Village apartment.
Larisa Shepitko
Ukrainian Soviet film director, screenwriter and actress. Larisa Shepitko's film The Ascent (1977) is a big film in the art film community. In 1979 Shepitko was tragically killed in a car accident at the age of forty.
Joan Micklin Silver
Omaha Nebraska born filmmaker who moved to New York City in 1967 and became a writer for The Village Voice. Her 1979 film Chilly Scenes of Winter with Mary Beth Hurt, John Heard, Peter Riegert and Gloria Grahame is a brilliant film I watch once a year.
Penelope Spheeris
American film director, producer, and screenwriter. Besides her well-known music trilogy The Decline of Western Civilization, Spheeris' 1984 film Suburbia is a truly profound portrait of the punk lifestyle and 80s counter culture, American dystopianism, parental sexual abuse, and life on the streets of California.
Jill Sprecher
American director, producer and writer. Directed Clockwatchers (1997) starring Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, Toni Collette and Alanna Ubach.
Chick Strand
American experimental filmmaker from Northern California. Strand studied anthropology at Berkeley and organized film happenings with Bruce Baillie, whom she founded Canyon Cinema with in 1961. In the early 60s, and started making personal films at age 34 which spanned three decades.
Barbra Streisand
American singer and actress whom directed Yentl (1983) and The Prince of Tides (1991).
Ann Turner
Australian writer and director mostly known for her distinctive 1989 film Celia, the horror coming-of-age film about a young girl in the 1950s who's imagination blurs reality through fantasy and a touch of grimness.
Agnès Varda
French director whom help define the French New Wave, and really went into uncharted territories with films like Vagabond (1985), The Gleaners and I (2000), Ydessa, the Bears etc. (2004), and The Beaches of Agnès (2008).
Phoebe Waller-Bridge
British actress and writer known for her television comedy Fleabag (2016/2019) which really stands out as a great show in a period with so much to watch and so much not worth watching.
Lois Weber
Weber was an American silent film actress, screenwriter, producer and director.
Lina Wertmüller
Italian film director and screenwriter best known for her 1970s art house films The Seduction of Mimi (1972), Love and Anarchy (1973), Swept Away (1974), and Seven Beauties (1975).
Joyce Wieland
Canadian experimental filmmaker, Weiland started out as a painter and shifted into filmmaking when she moved to New York City in the early sixties.
Claudia Weill
NYC director known for her stunning 1978 film Girlfriends, starring Melanie Mayron, Christopher Guest, Bob Balaban and Eli Wallach. Had never heard of the film before Criterion issued a blu ray, and the film quickly became a favorite at the offices of the art of memory.
Chloé Zhao
Seeing Zhao's 2017 film The Rider was one of those rare film experiences where a new world of experience through film opens up. Her Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015) and Nomadland (2020) are equally breathtaking and inspiring works worthy of close attention and rewatches. Zhao was born in Beijing and later went to graduate studies at NYU, she quotes Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together as a major influence, and the work of Spike Lee, Ang Lee, Werner Herzog and Terrence Malick.
