Josephine Decker’s film Shirley, starring Elisabeth Moss, won the 2020 Sundance U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Auteur Filmmaking. Her prior feature, Madeline’s Madeline, played at Sundance, Berlinale, and scores of festivals worldwide. Hailed a “mind-scrambling masterpiece” (Indiewire), it was nominated for Best Picture at IFP’s Gotham Awards and for two Independent Spirit Awards. Her most recent feature The Sky is Everywhere (Apple, A24) was a New York Times Critic's Pick.
Decker also explores collaborative storytelling by directing TV, documentaries, and theater, teaching at Princeton and CalArts and leading artist residencies with The School of Making Thinking. She is working on a documentary about teen mothers in Dallas, where she’s from. Dallas offers limited access to contraception and health insurance, housing assistance that has been priced out by the booming real estate market, and has the highest repeat teen pregnancy rate in the country.
At MacDowell, Decker worked on a screenplay inspired by fairy tales, by her time playing in an all-female accordion orchestra, and by the very epic and very ordinary aspects of motherhood.
She is in the process of adapting the book Swamplandia by Karen Russell for the screen in collaboration with FilmNation and the Miccosukee Nation. Her previous, critically-lauded films are available on Apple TV, Amazon, The Criterion Collection, and Hulu. Her short film Rise Again — made in collaboration with musicians Daniel Wohl, Grammy Winner Arooj Aftab, and with mothers supported by LA’s Upward Bound House— is touring in fall 2024 with live orchestral accompaniment by Alarm Will Sound alongside work by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Mati Diop, and Manon Lutanie.
Portrait by Eric Rudd, Indiana University
