Julie Ethel Dash is an American film director, writer and producer. Dash received her MFA in 1985 at the UCLA Film School and is one of the graduates and filmmakers known as the L.A. Rebellion. After she had written and directed several shorts, her 1991 feature Daughters of the Dust became the first full-length film directed by an African-American woman to obtain general theatrical release in the United States.
Lake Siegel Bell is an American actress, director, and screenwriter. She has starred in various television series, including Boston Legal (2004–2006), Surface (2005–2006), How to Make It in America (2010–2011), Childrens Hospital (2008–2016), and Bless This Mess (2019-2020) and in films including Over Her Dead Body (2008), What Happens in Vegas (2008), It's Complicated (2009), No Strings Attached (2011), Million Dollar Arm (2014), No Escape (2015), The Secret Life of Pets (2016), and Home Again (2017).
Lisa Cholodenko is an American screenwriter and director. Cholodenko wrote and directed the films High Art (1998), Laurel Canyon (2002), and The Kids Are All Right (2010). She has also directed television, including the miniseries Olive Kitteridge (2014) and Unbelievable (2019). She primarily directs New Queer Cinema style films and television, with large themes surrounding feminism and the LGBTQIA+ community.
Brook Maurio, known professionally by the pen name Diablo Cody, is an American writer and producer. She gained recognition for her candid blog and subsequent memoir, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper (2005). Cody received critical acclaim for her screenwriting debut film, Juno (2007), winning the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay, the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay, and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Tala Hadid is an award-winning film director and producer. She is also a photographer. Her work has shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, The Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, The Smithsonian National Museum, The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C., L'Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and other locations.
Maria Giese is an American feature film director and screenwriter. A member of the Directors Guild of America, and an activist for parity for women directors in Hollywood, she writes and lectures about the under-representation of women filmmakers in the United States.
Courtney Hunt is an American director and screenwriter. Her debut feature film, Frozen River, won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.
Withoutabox was a website founded in January 2000 by David Straus, Joe Neulight and Charles Neulight which allowed independent filmmakers to self-distribute their films. The first product launched was the International Film Festival Submission system. Withoutabox worked with film festivals and filmmakers all over the world. In January 2008, Withoutabox was acquired by IMDb, a subsidiary of Amazon.
Marielle Stiles Heller is an American writer, director, and actress. She is 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), as well as acting in The Queen’s Gambit (2020).
The Bechdel test, also known as the Bechdel–Wallace test, is a measure of the representation of women in fiction. It asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The requirement that the two women must be named is sometimes added.
Shonali Bose is an Indian film director, writer and film producer. Having made her feature film debut in 2005, she has since won such accolades as a National Film Award, a Bridgestone Narrative Award, and a Sundance Mahindra Global Filmmaker Award.
Amy Virginia Talkington is an American filmmaker, screenwriter, and author.
Martha Stephens is an American film writer and director.
The Foxy Merkins is an American comedy film directed by Madeleine Olnek and the lowest budget narrative feature in the Sundance 2014 film festival. The film had its world premiere at Sundance NEXT Weekend on August 9, 2013 and later screened at 2014 Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2014. It had its international premiere at the Moscow International Film Festival on June 25, 2014, selected for screening despite the hostile climate towards LGBT people in Russia.
Lilly Hartley is an American documentary film producer and actress, and the founder of Candescent Films.
Eliza Hittman is an American screenwriter, film director, and producer from New York City.
How to Dance in Ohio is a 2015 American documentary film directed by Alexandra Shiva. The film follows a group of teenagers with autism in Columbus, Ohio preparing for their first spring formal. They spend 12 weeks practising their social skills in preparation. HBO Documentary Films acquired television rights to the film eleven days before its world premiere at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. The film premiered on HBO on October 26, 2015. Three young women are the main subjects of the documentary.
Hilary Brougher is a screenwriter and director living and working in N.Y.C. She says that the reason she is inspired to make films is that " [she] was interested in the connection that happens among audience members via a shared screen, and the collaboration that happens in making films. That was three decades ago. [She] is still interested." She wrote and directed her first feature, The Sticky Fingers of Time in 1996. She wrote and directed her second feature, Stephanie Daley in 2006. The film starred Tilda Swinton, Amber Tamblyn, Melissa Leo, Tim Hutton and Denis O’Hare. In 2006, the film won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Film Festival and Brougher won Best Director at the Milan International Film Festival, while actress Amber Tamblyn won Best Actress from The Locarno International Film Festival in 2006. The film was bought by Lifetime Television and the title changed to What She Knew. In 2014 Brougher was credited as co-writer with Tristine Skyler and director of an adaptation of Jane Mendelsohn’s novel, Innocence. In 2017, Brougher wrote and directed an original film, South Mountain which premiered at SXSW 2019 in the Narrative Features Competition. The film was highly regarded by critics including The Hollywood Reporter, Variety and Indiewire. In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Brougher discussed her micro-budget experience, "This was the smallest budget I've worked with and yet it felt the most ample."
Naomi McDougall Jones is an American actress, writer and producer.
The Father is a 2020 drama film co-written and directed by Florian Zeller, based on his 2012 play Le Père. A French-British co-production, the film stars Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Mark Gatiss, Imogen Poots, Rufus Sewell, and Olivia Williams, and follows an aging Welshman who must deal with his progressing memory loss.
