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Lizzie Borden (born 3 February 1958, Detroit, Michigan) is an American filmmaker. Originally named Linda Elizabeth Borden, she took on the name of the American folklore figure Lizzie Borden in the early 1970s.

Borden’s best known film is Born in Flames (1983), which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and won several awards, concerning the racial, class, and political conflicts in a future United States socialist democracy. It is distributed by First Run Features and was named one of “The Most Important 50 Independent Films” by Filmmaker Magazine. It has been studied in numerous feminist texts. Borden also wrote, directed, and produced a successful yet highly controversial independent fiction film Working Girls in 1986, depicting the working lives of prostitutes. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Director’s Fortnight, won best Feature at the Sundance Film Festival and was distributed by Miramax. Her next film, the only one not based on an original script, was Love Crimes (1992). It starred Sean Young and Patrick Bergin, and was subjected to much studio interference. Borden has subsequently directed episodes of “Red Shoes Diaries”, “Alex Mack” and other episodic television, directed theater in Los Angeles and has written a script about Bob Marley based on Rita Marley’s autobiography “No Woman No Cry.” She has several independent films in development and is currently writing a pilot for Fox Film Studios. —Wikipedia

Monika Treut, born April 6, 1954, in Mönchengladbach, made her high school exam at a state-run school for girls and subsequently started to study German studies and political science and graduated with a state examination in 1978.

From 1974 on, already during her studies, and until 1982, she worked at several media centres, for instance, in Marburg, Frankfurt, and in Berlin where she organized film screenings and was involved in the production of video documentaries.

In 1984, she did her PhD in Marburg with a thesis about the image of women in the writings of de Sade and Sacher-Masoch and became a doctor of philology. In the same year, she set up the production company “Hyäne I/II Filmproduktion” together with Elfie Mikesch in Hamburg.

One year later, Treut finished her debut film for the movie screen, the experimental feature film “Verführung: Die grausame Frau” (“Seduction: The Cruel Woman”) about the sadomasochistic experiences of a group of fairly different people.

After working as an assistant director for Werner Schroeter at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf in 1987, Treut finished her second feature-length film, the award-winning drama “Die Jungfrauenmaschine” (“Virgin Machine”, 1988). All of Treut’s documentary, experimental, and narrative films are influenced by a distinct feminist perspective and always deal with alternative gender roles and constellations.

After the award-winning comedy “My Father Is Coming” (1991), Treut focused on documentary films. In this department and produced by the production company “Hyena Films” that was set up in 1992, Treut finished several of her most important and partly award-winning films: “Gendernauts – Eine Reise durch die Geschlechter” (“Gendernauts: A Story Through Shifting”, 1999) about the phenomenon of trans-sexuality, “Kriegerin des Lichts” (“Warrior of Light”, 2001) about a female Brazilian street worker, and “Den Tigerfrauen wachsen Flügel” (“Tigerwomen Grow Wings”, 2005) about three generations of women in Taiwan. Besides her work as a filmmaker, Treut pursues numerous academic occupations, mainly in the USA. Over the years, film festivals all over the world have dedicated retrospectives to her work. In 2009, Monika Treut once again finished a feature film, “Ghosted”, a blend of a mystery drama and a love story. —filmportal.de