Women filmmakers
by renato-trevizano | created - 03 Jul 2013 | updated - 03 Jul 2013 | Public
1. Chantal Akerman
Director | Les rendez-vous d'Anna
Chantal Akerman was born on June 6, 1950 in Brussels, Belgium. She was a director and writer, known for The Meetings of Anna (1978), I, You, He, She (1974) and A Couch in New York (1996). She was married to Sonia Wieder-Atherton. She died on October 5, 2015 in Paris, France.
2. Naomi Kawase
Director | An
Naomi Kawase was born on May 30, 1969 in Nara, Japan. She is a director and writer, known for Sweet Bean (2015), Still the Water (2014) and Suzaku (1997). She was previously married to Takenori Sentô.
3. Lynne Ramsay
Director | You Were Never Really Here
Lynne Ramsay was born on December 5, 1969 in Glasgow, Strathclyde, Scotland, UK. She is a director and writer, known for You Were Never Really Here (2017), We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) and Ratcatcher (1999). She was previously married to Rory Stewart Kinnear.
4. Sofia Coppola
Actress | The Godfather Part III
Sofia Coppola was born on May 14, 1971 in New York City, New York, USA as Sofia Carmina Coppola. She is a director, known for Somewhere (2010), Lost in Translation (2003), and Marie Antoinette (2006). She has been married to Thomas Mars since August 27, 2011. They have two daughters, Romy and ...
5. Agnès Varda
Director | Cléo de 5 à 7
Agnès Varda was born on May 30, 1928 in Ixelles, Belgium. She was a director and writer, known for Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Vagabond (1985) and Faces Places (2017). She was married to Jacques Demy. She died on March 29, 2019 in Paris, France.
6. Marguerite Duras
Writer | Le camion
Ms. Duras was born in southern Vietnam and lost her father at age 4. The family savings of 20 years bought the family a small plot in Cambodia, but everything was lost in a single season's flooding. The disaster killed her mother as a result. After high school in Saigon, Ms. Duras left Indochina to...
7. Lena Dunham
Writer | Tiny Furniture
New Yorker Lena Dunham is the daughter of a painter, Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons, a designer and photographer. Dunham was educated at Oberlin College, Ohio, graduating with a creative writing degree. It was while at Oberlin that she began writing shorts and feature films. In 2009, Dunham ...
8. Claire Denis
Director | High Life
The films of Claire Denis frequently explore the fragile connections between people and the ways in which the most seemingly inconsequential relationship can have life-changing effects. At the heart of Denis' cinema is a fascination with the delights and difficulties of belonging and otherness, the...
9. Catherine Breillat
Writer | À ma soeur!
Catherine Breillat is a Paris based filmmaker and writer who became famous for her distinctively personal films on sexuality, gender trouble and sibling rivalry. Accused of being a "porno auteuriste", Breillat allowed for an unbiased view of sexuality and extended the language of mainstream movies....
10. Vera Chytilová
Director | O necem jiném
Vera Chytilová was born on February 2, 1929, in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic). She studied philosophy and architecture in Brno for two years, then worked as a technical draftsman, a designer, a fashion model, a photo re-toucher, then worked as a clapper girl for Barrandov Film ...
11. Lucrecia Martel
Director | La mujer sin cabeza
Born in 1966 in Salta in the North of Argentina,Lucrecia Martel settled down in Buenos Aires where she attended the ENERC (National Film School). She started by directing a few shorts among which Historias Breves I: Rey muerto (1995), which garnered several awards in the international film festival...
12. Margarethe von Trotta
Director | Hannah Arendt
Margarethe von Trotta was born in Berlin in 1942. In the 1960s she moved to Paris where she worked for film collectives, collaborating on scripts and co-directing short films. She also pursued an acclaimed acting career, starring in films by well known German directors such as Rainer Werner ...
13. Larisa Shepitko
Director | Voskhozhdenie
Larisa Shepitko was born on January 6, 1938 in Bakhmut, Ukrainian SSR, USSR [now Bakhmut, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine]. She was a director and writer, known for The Ascent (1977), Heat (1963) and You and Me (1971). She was married to Elem Klimov. She died on July 2, 1979 in near Redkino, Kalinin Oblast...
14. Kelly Reichardt
Director | Wendy and Lucy
Kelly Reichardt was born and raised in Miami-Dade Country, Florida, to a family of police officers. She had an interest in photography from a very young age. She started by using her father's camera, which he used for photographing crime scenes. She went to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in ...
15. Lynn Hershman Leeson
Director | Teknolust
Lynn Hershman Leeson was born in 1941. She is a director and producer, known for Teknolust (2002), Strange Culture (2007) and Conceiving Ada (1997).
16. Nanouk Leopold
Director | Boven is het stil
Nanouk Leopold (Rotterdam, 1968) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam in 1992 and from the Dutch Film and Television Academy in 1998. Her graduation film 'Weekend' won the Tuschinski Award for best student film. Her first feature 'Îles Flottantes' was selected for the IFFR Tiger ...
17. Kathryn Bigelow
Director | Zero Dark Thirty
A very talented painter, Kathryn spent two years at the San Francisco Art Institute. At 20, she won a scholarship to the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program. She was given a studio in a former Offtrack Betting building, literally in an old bank vault, where she made art and waited to be ...
18. Dorota Kedzierzawska
Director | Nic
Dorota Kedzierzawska was born on June 1, 1957 in Lódz, Lódzkie, Poland. She is a director and writer, known for Nothing (1998), Time to Die (2007) and Crows (1994).
19. Mia Hansen-Løve
Director | L'avenir
Cinema came into Mia Hansen-Løve's life when she was seventeen, as Olivier Assayas made her start as an actress in Late August, Early September (1998). Two years later, he gave her the part of "Aline" in his Les Destinées (2000). Their artistic collaboration was coupled by a union in real ...
20. Susanne Bier
Director | Hævnen
Though Academy Award®, Golden Globe Award and Emmy Award winning writer and director Susanne Bier's work often plays out against a wide-reaching global backdrop, its focus is intimate, carefully exploring the explosive emotions and complexities of familial bonds. This unique combination is part of ...
21. Maartje Seyferth
Director | Vlees
Maartje Seyferth was born on January 26, 1945 in Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands. She is a director and writer, known for Meat (2010), Laatste Dagen and Cat and Mouse (2015). She is married to Victor Nieuwenhuijs. She was previously married to Hugo Metsers.
22. Danièle Huillet
Director | Sicilia!
Danièle Huillet was born on May 1, 1936 in Paris, France. She was a director and editor, known for Sicily! (1999), Class Relations (1984) and The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968). She was married to Jean-Marie Straub. She died on October 9, 2006 in Cholet, Maine-et-Loire, France.
23. Maya Deren
Director | Meshes of the Afternoon
Maya Deren came to the USA in 1922 as Eleanora Derenkowsky. Together with her father Solomon Derenkowsky, a psychiatrist, and her mother Maria Fidler, an artist, she fled the pogroms organized by the Bolsheviks against the Jews. She studied journalism and political science at the Syracuse ...
24. Germaine Dulac
Director | Âme d'artiste
The daughter of a cavalry captain, she was raised by a grandmother in Paris, where she studied various forms of art with an emphasis on music and the opera. In 1905 she married engineer-novelist Marie-Louis Albert-Dulac and under his influence veered toward journalism. As one of the leading radical...
25. Jane Arden
Writer | Anti-Clock
Jane Arden was born in Wales in 1927 and left for London in her teens.
She trained at RADA and quickly began working as an actress and playwright. It was there that she met her future husband, Philip Saville, who is now perhaps most known for his work Boys from the Blackstuff (1982) and The Life and...
26. Jane Campion
Writer | Bright Star
Jane Campion was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and now lives in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Having graduated with a BA in Anthropology from Victoria University of Wellington in 1975, and a BA, with a painting major, at Sydney College of the Arts in 1979, she began filmmaking in the early...
27. Leni Riefenstahl
Producer | Das blaue Licht - Eine Berglegende aus den Dolomiten
Leni Riefenstahl's show-biz experience began with an experiment: she wanted to know what it felt like to dance on the stage. Success as a dancer gave way to film acting when she attracted the attention of film director Arnold Fanck, subsequently starring in some of his mountaineering pictures. With...
28. Ann Hui
Director | Nu ren si shi
Born in China in 1947, Ann Hui moved to Hong Kong when she was still in her youth. After graduating in English and Comparative Literature from Hong Kong University, she spent two years at the London Film School. Returning to Hong Kong, she worked as an assistant to director King Hu before joining ...
29. Claudia Llosa
Director | La teta asustada
Claudia Llosa was born on November 15, 1976 in Lima, Peru. She is a director and writer, known for The Milk of Sorrow (2009), Madeinusa (2006) and Loxoro (2012).
30. Petra Costa
Director | The Edge of Democracy
Petra Costa was born on July 8, 1983 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. She is a director and producer, known for The Edge of Democracy (2019), Olmo & the Seagull (2015) and Undertow Eyes (2009).
31. Maja Milos
Director | Klip
Maja Milos is a Serbian film director and screenwriter. She achieved her greatest success with the film "Clip." She graduated in film management in 2008 from the University of Arts in Belgrade. During her studies, she directed eleven films, including "Interval." "Clip" is her first feature film, ...
32. Daniela Thomas
Director | Terra Estrangeira
Daniela Thomas is a multimedia artist. She directs and writes films, creates opera and theater sets, writes and directs plays, designs and curates exhibitions. She was born and is based in Brazil, but her work has been seen, exhibited and played around the world. It all started in the early 80s at ...
33. Juliana Rojas
Director | As Boas Maneiras
The writer and director was born in Campinas, Brazil. Her solo work includes the award-winning short films O Duplo, which won a Special Mention at La Semaine de la Critique in Cannes, and The Passage of the Comet, as well as the feature film Necropolis Symphony, which won the FIPRESCI Prize at the ...
34. Lúcia Murat
Writer | Quase Dois Irmãos
Born in Rio de Janeiro, Lúcia Murat was member of the Brazilian leftist "guerrilha" in the hardest times of military dictatorship in Brazil (1968-1979). She was arrested and tortured in prison, and this experience is highly influential in all of her work. Undoubtedly Lúcia Murat is the most ...
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