Female Directors

Helen Hunt

Early life
Hunt was born in Culver City, California, the daughter of Jane Elizabeth (née Novis), a photographer, and Gordon Hunt, a film director and acting coach.[1][2] Her uncle, Peter H. Hunt, is also a director, and her maternal grandmother, Dorothy Fries (née Anderson) was a voice coach.[1][3] Hunt is of Jewish (from her paternal grandmother)[4] and Methodist background.[5] Hunt spent part of her childhood in New York City and later attended the University of California at Los Angeles.[6]

Career
Hunt began working in the 1970s as a child actress. Her early roles included an appearance as Murray Slaughter's daughter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, alongside Lindsay Wagner in an episode of The Bionic Woman, and a regular role in the television series The Swiss Family Robinson. She appeared as a marijuana-smoking classmate on an episode of The Facts of Life. She also appeared as a young woman who, while on PCP, jumps out of a second-story window in a 1982 after school special called Desperate Lives (a scene which she mocked during a Saturday Night Live monologue in 1994).[7] In the mid-1980s, she had a recurring role on St. Elsewhere as Clancy Williams, girlfriend of Dr. Jack "Boomer" Morrison. She remains best known for one of her earliest roles as Jennie in Bill: On His Own, costarring Mickey Rooney.







Nancy Malone

Nancy Malone (born March 19, 1935) is an American television actress, principally in guest roles from the 1950s to 1970s, who moved into producing and directing in the 1980s and 1990s.

She played "Libby" on the TV series Naked City from 1960 to 1963. During the same period, she played the character "Robin Lang Bowden Fletcher" on the daytime soap opera Guiding Light. She subsequently played "Clara Varner" on the TV series The Long Hot Summer (TV series 1965-1966), which ran for one season on ABC.

In 1976, she became the first female vice-president of television at 20th Century Fox. She won an Emmy Award for producing Bob Hope: The First 90 Years (1993) (TV) and was nominated for Emmy Awards for directing episodes of Sisters in (1991), and The Trials of Rosie O'Neill in (1992).






Kimberley Peirce
Early life and career
Born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Peirce grew up in a trailer park.[citation needed] She graduated from Miami Sunset High School in Miami, Florida and attended the University of Chicago,[1] earning a degree in English and Japanese Literature.[citation needed] She moved for several years to Kobe, Japan, working as a photographer and model.[citation needed] Upon returning to America, she enrolled at Columbia University,[1] earning an MFA in film.[1] Initially, Peirce pursued a story about a female soldier in drag during the American Civil War for her thesis,[citation needed] but eventually nixed the plan due to a lack of personal connection with the story.[citation needed]

While attending Columbia, Peirce read a Village Voice article[citation needed] about Brandon Teena, a transman raped and murdered in Falls City, Nebraska.[1] Switching from her original thesis project, Peirce traveled to Falls City, where she researched and attended the trial of the two homicide suspects.[1] The subsequent film short she made for her thesis in 1995 was nominated by Columbia faculty for a Princess Grace Award, and received an Astrea Production Grant.[1] That grant and her involvement with the Sundance Institute;'s 1997 Sundance Filmmakers, Writers and Producers Labs helped her develop the short into the 1999 feature film Boys Don't Cry.[1]


Later life and career
Since then, she has directed an episode of the Showtime television series The L Word, and the Paramount Pictures feature Stop-Loss, (2008).

Canceled projects she worked on in the interim included co-writing the script Silent Star, about the murder of silent movie director William Desmond Taylor, for the studio DreamWorks; a David Mamet script she would direct about gangster John Dillinger; directing the adaptation of author Dave Eggers' memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; and research for a Columbia Pictures film she would direct about the execution of the Israeli spy Eli Cohen.[2]

As of 2008, Peirce was co-writing a feature title Sex, Secrets and Taboo in Suburbia,[1] a romantic comedy with a "gender twist",[1] and a New Orleans gangster movie.[1] As of April 2008, Peirce lives with lesbian partner Evren Savci, "a Ph.D. candidate writing a double theses on gender and sexuality and Turkish modernization".[3]





Coline Serreau
Coline Serreau (born October 29, 1947 in Paris) is a French film director and writer.

In Paris Serreau studied literature, music and theatre as well as circus. In 1970 she made her debut as an actress at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, in 1973 she wrote her first screenplay.

Her first film , the documentary film Mais qu'est ce qu'elles veulent? (1978), literally: But what do they want, after all?, was a compilation of interviews with women from various backgrounds. The frankness of the statements shocked parts of the public.

Her biggest commercial success was the comedy Trois hommes et un couffin (Three Men and a Baby), for which she received three Césars in 1986.

In 1986 her first drama for the stage Lapin Lapin (Rabbit Rabbit) had its world premiere (Director: Benno Besson). She collaborated with Besson for several years and he also put on stage Le théâtre de verdure (1987) and Quisaitout et Grobêta (1993).




Betty Thomas
Born Betty Thomas Nienhauser in St. Louis, Missouri, Thomas graduated from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. She worked as an artist and taught school in Chicago before deciding to pursue a career in show business.

Thomas joined The Second City comedy group and appeared in the films Tunnel Vision (1975), Chesty Anderson, USN (1976), Used Cars (1980) and Loose Shoes (1980) and on the TV series The Fun Factory (1976).

While Thomas had been building her career in comedy, her breakthrough role as an actress came when she was cast in the dramatic role of police officer (later Sergeant) Lucille Bates on the TV series Hill Street Blues (1981-1987). She was nominated for six Emmy Awards for this role and won one for Best Supporting Actress in 1985. Thomas' character was paired with Officer Joe Coffey, portrayed by Ed Marinaro.

Following the end of the series, Thomas moved into directing. She first worked in TV, directing episodes of series such as Doogie Howser, M.D., Dream On, Hooperman, Mancuso, FBI, Midnight Caller, On the Air, Parenthood, Shannon's Deal and Sons and Daughters, and TV movies such as Couples (1994), My Breast (1994), and The Late Shift (1996). She won Emmys for her direction of Dream On in 1990 and My Breast in 1994.

Thomas made her feature film directorial debut in 1992 with Only You. She went on to direct several films, including The Brady Bunch Movie (1995), Private Parts (1997), Dr. Dolittle (1998), 28 Days (2000), and I Spy (2002). She has also produced several films, including Can't Hardly Wait (1998), Charlie's Angels (2000), and Surviving Christmas (2004).

In December 2008 Thomas signed on to direct Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel.