In 2015 after four years of activism in the Directors Guild of America, Maria Giese became the person who instigated the groundbreaking industry-wide Federal investigation for women directors in Hollywood. In The New York Times, Manohla Dargis referred to her work as "a veritable crusade." Giese and her work are a subject of three recent books and two award-winning feature documentaries: This Changes Everything (2019) and "Half The Picture" (2018). Her 2019 TEDx talk, "The Battle For Female Voices in Entertainment Media," and her upcoming book, Troublemaker, describe her work getting the ACLU and EEOC to investigate this issue- the ramifications of which are resonating globally.

Giese is a subject in and co-produced the 2022 feature documentary "Brainwashed: Sex and Power, the Visual Language of Cinema", and is attached to direct a feature documentary, "Women On Wall Street", and a narrative feature film, "Oliver Outloud", a story of a painter with Tourettes Syndrome. Prior to that, she wrote and directed the 1996 feature film When Saturday Comes starring Sean Bean and Pete Postlethwaite, and the 2007 award-winning digital feature film Hunger based on the novel by Nobel Prize-winner Knut Hamsun. She has also directed two Golden Cine Eagle-winning short films, and has written three screenplays that have been produced into feature films, including "North Star" directed by Nils Gaup and starring James Caan, Christophe Lambert and Catherine McCormack.

A member of the Directors Guild of America, Giese holds a BA from Wellesley College and a Master's degree from UCLA's Graduate School of Theatre, Film and Television. In 2016 she was awarded the prestigious Equity Award from Stanford University and her articles have appeared in Ms. Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, Elle, IndieWIRE, and Film Inquiry. Giese herself has appeared on CNN Global, BBC International, ABC Live, Sky TV UK Live, Bloomberg TV, and NPR. She has been featured in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Forbes, Fortune, Cosmopolitan, LA Weekly, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, The Guardian, among others internationally.

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Maria Giese

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