Maria Maggenti

Writer/Director Maria Maggenti was born in Washington, D.C. When she was 11-years-old, she moved with her single mother and younger sister to Lagos, Nigeria, where her mother served as an agricultural economist on assignment with the World Bank. Maggenti returned to Washington to finish high school and, when she was 18, she took off for Italy. After a couple of years of continental life, she settled down at Smith College, where she studied philosophy and the classics.

After college, Maggenti moved to New York and began working in television commercials. Convinced that she was contributing to the decline of Western civilization, she quickly moved on to documentary filmmaking. Her credits include Associate Producer of Phil Zwickler's award-winning documentary Rights and Reactions and the Testing the Limits film, Voices from the Front, which earned the Best Documentary Award at the 1992 Berlin Film Festival. Her documentary "Doctors, Liars, and Women: AIDS Activists Say No To Cosmo" has won many awards.

Maggenti was accepted into the NYU Graduate Film Program and was awarded a teaching fellowship after her first year. Her short films have been screened internationally at festivals and her 1993 film, Name Day, received the Warner Brothers Production Award and the Grand Prize at the 1993 Hamptons International Film Festival.

Note: This profile was written in or before 2002.

Maria Maggenti Facts

Occupation

Director, Writer

Selected Filmography

Not available.