Agnès Varda was a Belgian-born French film director, screenwriter and photographer.
Barbara Jean Hammer was an American feminist film director, producer, writer, and cinematographer. She is known for being one of the pioneers of the lesbian film genre, and her career spanned over 50 years. Hammer is known for having created experimental films dealing with women's issues such as gender roles, lesbian relationships, coping with aging, and family life. She resided in New York City and Kerhonkson, New York, and taught each summer at the European Graduate School.
Lourdes Portillo was a Mexican film director, producer, and writer. The political perspectives of Portillo's films have been described as "nuanced" and versed with a point of view balanced by her experience as a lesbian and Chicana woman. Portillo films have been widely studied and analyzed, particularly by scholars in the field of Chicano studies.
Cheryl Dunye is a Liberian-American film director, producer, screenwriter, editor and actress. Dunye's work often concerns themes of race, sexuality, and gender, particularly issues relating to black lesbians. She is known as the first out black lesbian to ever direct a feature film with her 1996 film The Watermelon Woman. She runs the production company Jingletown Films based in Oakland, California.
Rea Tajiri is an American video artist, filmmaker, and screenwriter, known for her personal essay film History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991).
Marie Losier is a filmmaker and curator who's worked in New York City for 25 years and has shown her films and videos at museums, galleries, biennials and festivals. Losier studied literature at the University of Nanterre and Fine Arts at Hunter College in New York City. She has made a number of film portraits of avant-garde directors, musicians and composers, such as the Kuchar brothers, Guy Maddin, Richard Foreman, Tony Conrad, Genesis P-Orridge, Alan Vega, Peter Hristoff and Felix Kubin. Whimsical, poetic, dreamlike and unconventional, her films explore the life and work of these artists.
Renee Tajima-Peña is an American filmmaker whose work focuses on immigrant communities, race, gender and social justice. Her directing and producing credits include the documentaries Who Killed Vincent Chin?, No Más Bebés, My America...or Honk if You Love Buddha, Calavera Highway, Skate Manzanar, Labor Women and the 5-part docuseries Asian Americans.
Lynne Sachs is an American experimental filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from documentaries, to essay films, to experimental shorts, to hybrid live performances. Working from a feminist perspective, Sachs weaves together social criticism with personal subjectivity. Her films embrace a radical use of archives, performance and intricate sound work. Between 2013 and 2020, she collaborated with musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello on five films.
Kimberlee Acquaro is an American filmmaker and photojournalist. Acquaro 's work covers human and civil rights, racial and gender justice. She has been nominated for an Academy Award and won an Emmy for Best Documentary. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Film and the Pew Fellowship in International Journalism, Otis College of Art and Design's LA Artist Residency and an Emerging Curator's Fellowship.
Rebecca Cammisa is an American documentary filmmaker two-times Oscar nominated, Emmy award winner, and founder of Documentress Films.
Akosua Adoma Owusu is a Ghanaian-American filmmaker and producer. Her films explore the colliding identities of black immigrants in America through multiple forms ranging from cinematic essays to experimental narratives to reconstructed Black popular media. Interpreting the notion of "double consciousness," coined by sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, Owusu aims to create a third cinematic space or consciousness. In her work, feminism, queerness, and African identities interact in African, white American, and black American cultural spaces.
Yoruba Richen is an American film director, screenwriter and producer. Her work has been featured on PBS, New York Times Op Doc, Frontline Digital, New York Magazine's website -The Cut, The Atlantic and Field of Vision. Her film The Green Book: Guide to Freedom was broadcast on the Smithsonian Channel to record audiences and was awarded the Henry Hampton Award for Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking.
Eliza Hittman is an American screenwriter, film director, and producer from New York City. She has won multiple awards for her film Never Rarely Sometimes Always, which include the New York Film Critics Circle Award and the National Society of Film Critics Award—both for best screenplay.
Kathe Sandler is a filmmaker. She won a 1996 Guggenheim Award and two Prized Pieces Awards from the National Black Programming Consortium. She also received two fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts for filmmaking.
Isabelle Boni-Claverie is an author, screenwriter, and film director born in the Ivory Coast. She moved to Switzerland when she was a few months old, then to France, but mostly grew up in Paris.
The Creation of Meaning is a 2014 experimental film directed by Simone Rapisarda Casanova.
Nuotama Frances Bodomo is a Ghanaian filmmaker, writer and director.
Kimi Takesue is an experimental filmmaker. Her films have screened widely, including at Sundance Film Festival, Locarno Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Los Angeles Film Festival, South by Southwest, ICA London, Cinéma du Réel, DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, Krakow Film Festival, Slamdance Film Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai, and the Walker Art Center. Her films have been broadcast on PBS, IFC, and the Sundance Channel. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship, and two NYFA fellowships. She is associate professor at Rutgers University–Newark.
Jenn Nkiru is a Nigerian-British artist and director. She is known for directing the music video for Beyoncé's "Brown Skin Girl" and for being the second unit director of Ricky Saiz’s video for Beyoncé and Jay-Z, "APESHIT" which was released in 2018. She was selected to participate in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
Sky Hopinka is an American visual artist and filmmaker who is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people. Hopinka was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.
