Maria Giese wrote and directed the 1996 feature film When Saturday Comes starring Sean Bean and Pete Postlethwaite, and the 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. She is a member of the Directors Guild of America, Film Fatales, and the Alliance of Women Directors, and is founding chair of the annual Women’s Media Summit.
In 2015 after four years of activism in the Directors Guild of America, Giese became the person who instigated the biggest industry-wide Federal investigation for women directors in Hollywood history. In The New York Times, Manohla Dargis referred to her work as “a veritable crusade.” Her new 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.