Maria Giese

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.

She has an Associates Degree from Simon’s Rock of Bard College, a bachelor's degree from Wellesley College and a Masters of Fine Arts in film directing from the University of California, Los Angeles's Graduate School of Film and Technology. While at UCLA, she produced the student film A Dry Heat, for which she won a CINE Golden Eagle Award.

Giese wrote and directed the 1996 British film When Saturday Comes, produced by Capitol Films, UK, starring Sean Bean, Pete Postlethwaite, and Emily Lloyd. She also wrote, directed, and co-produced Hunger, based on Knut Hamsun's 1890 existentialist novel of the same title. Hunger was the first digital film made based on a classic work of literature. It starred Joseph Culp and Robert Culp and received two Best Film Awards and a Best Underground Film award.

Giese's other directing work includes the short doc A Lotta Lambada and the short film A Dry Heat, which won a UCLA Spotlight award, a Cine Golden Eagle, and was a finalist for the 1991 Student Academy Awards. She also directed the short film Take Your Seat (aka Jewish Water) which also won a Cine Golden Eagle, and an episode of the TV sitcom Solo En America for Columbia TriStar. She did uncredited rewrites on the 1996 film North Star.

She has taught film & TV production at UCLA Extension, lectures regularly, and writes extensively.

Giese is an active member of the Directors Guild of America since 1999 and currently serves as the Women’s DGA Director Category Rep.

Giese is the recipient of numerous awards including 2016 Equity Award from Stanford University, two Golden Cine Eagles, a Kovler Writing Award, a Spotlight Award, First Prize at the American International Film Festival, a Charles Speroni Scholarship, and an MPAA Award of Excellence.

Giese is an activist for women directors. She is a member of the Director’s Guild of America where she is an active member of the Women’s Steering Committee and where she served as the inaugural “Women Directors Category Representative” and the inaugural co-chair of the DGA-WSC Proposals Subcommittee, the first ever conduit between the Women’s Steering Committee and the DGA National Board. On this committee, she and co-chair, Melanie Wagor, were able to move proposals for women DGA members into the 2014 DGA-studio Collective Bargaining Negotiations.

She is also a member of the Alliance of Women Directors. She co-founded, and frequently writes for, the advocacy website Women Directors in Hollywood. Her articles have appeared in Ms., Elle, Film Inquiry, and IndieWIRE. Giese herself has recently been profiled in Bloomberg TV, ABC Live, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Fortune, and The Hollywood Reporter, among others. Her writings have also appeared in Ms. magazine and Indiewire.

In 2011 Giese turned her attention to the underrepresentation of women directors in United States media. She began researching and writing about viable legal strategies to remediate illegal discrimination against women in Hollywood, citing Title VII. Finally, in 2015 after four years of activism in the Directors Guild of America, Giese became the person who instigated the biggest industry-wide Federal investigation for women directors in Hollywood history, going on now.

In The New York Times, Manohla Dargis referred to her work as “a veritable crusade.” And in 2016, Philadelphia Inquirer writer, Carrie Rickey, wrote, "So allow me to introduce real-life female crusader Maria Giese, whose fact-finding led to the ACLU findings that prompted the current EEOC investigation.” According to The Los Angeles Times in October 2016, the EEOC ”is now widening its circle of interview subjects to include studio executives, producers, agents, actors and male directors, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly."

Giese lives in Venice, CA and Stonington, CT with her husband and two children.

• A Dry Heat (1991)
• When Saturday Comes (1996)
• Hunger (2001)