Name Claudia Weill | Role Film director | |
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Awards David di Donatello Special Award Nominations Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Director of a Play Movies Girlfriends, It's My Turn, He's Way More Famous T, A Child Lost Forever, The Other Half of the Sky: A Ch Similar People | ||
Girlfriends | Claudia Weill
Claudia Weill is an American film director best known for her film Girlfriends (1978), starring Melanie Mayron, Christopher Guest, Bob Balaban and Eli Wallach, made independently and sold to Warner Bros after multiple awards at Cannes, Filmex and Sundance. It's My Turn (1980 for Columbia Pictures), with Jill Clayburgh, Michael Douglas, and Charles Grodin won her the Donatello, or International Oscar for best new director.
Earlier work includes thirty films for Sesame Street, freelancing as a camerawoman and numerous documentaries, notably The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir, a documentary about the first women's delegation to China in 1973, headed by Shirley MacLaine, nominated for an Academy Award and released theatrically and on PBS.
In 1979, the Supersisters trading card set was produced and distributed; one of the cards featured Weill's name and picture.
After moving to Los Angeles in 1986, Weill began directing TV episodes of Thirtysomething, My So-Called Life, Once and Again, Chicago Hope, and numerous pilots. Most recently, she has been directing Girls for HBO.
Originally a theatre director (Williamstown, The O’Neill, Sundance, ACT, Empty Space and in New York at MTC, the Public, and Circle Rep), she won the Drama Desk’s Best Director Award for the premiere of Donald Margulies’ Found a Peanut produced by Joe Papp at the Public Theater in 1984.
More recently she directed The Belle of Belfast by Nate Rufus Edelman at EST, Twelfth Night for Antaeus, the West Coast Premiere of Pulitzer Prize winner Doubt by John Patrick Shanley (with Linda Hunt) at the Pasadena Playhouse, Memory House, End Days, Tape, numerous workshops of Modern Orthodox, Adam Baum and the Jew Movie (Goldfarb), The Parents' Evening by Bathsheba Doran at the Vineyard Playhouse, and Huck and Holden by Rajiv Joseph at the Black Dahlia, among others.
Weill has guest taught directing for film, television and/or theatre at Harvard, NYU, Juilliard, and Cal Arts and is currently teaching TV Directing at Columbia. Previously she was a Professor at USC in the School of Cinema. She mentors playwrights and directors.
Weill's distant cousin was the composer Kurt Weill, famous for such works as The Threepenny Opera, which contained the popular song "Mack the Knife". She graduated from Harvard University in 1969.