Natasha Maidoff is an independent filmmaker with work in the permanent collection of the Modern Museum of Art in New York and as part of the Feminist Art Base in the Brooklyn Museum. She has received artist residencies from Yaddo, Wexner Center for the Arts and Virginia Center for Creative Arts, VCCA-France, and been awarded numerous grants including a Mellon Grant.

Maidoff has developed several TV series, and written/directed over 28 award-winning films, installations, and documentaries including her recent film “The Fullest Day of Summer,” which addresses the opiate crisis.  Her films continue to be screened internationally.

Maidoff is currently an Assistant Professor of Story & Vision at University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA). Prior to UNCSA, Maidoff was an Adjunct Assistant Professor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts in their graduate and undergraduate programs teaching screenwriting and directing.  She has also taught as a University Lecturer at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts and as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Ohio University’s graduate film program.

While living in southeast Ohio, Maidoff became aware of the devastation the opiate epidemic was wreaking on the foothills of Appalachia. She met two young women surviving with opiate-addicted parents.  Their story inspired The Fullest Day of Summer and informed her novel, Opiate Orphans, (represented by Transatlantic Agency). Maidoff’s writing has been optioned by Hollywood producers and represented by CAA. She’s been a finalist with Sundance Writer’s Lab (twice), and a quarter-finalist with Scriptapalooza and Academy Nicholls Fellowship. Her script Illegitimate placed as semifinalist for The Writers Lab in 2021.

Maidoff earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from Oberlin College and an M.F.A. in Screenwriting from UCLA’s School of Film, Theater and Television where she won the Director’s Spotlight Award. She was raised by two artists, her father, Jules Maidoff, a painter who founded Studio Art Centers International in Florence, Italy, and her mother, Ilka List, a figurative sculptor and author.

“I have nothing but praise and admiration for Natasha’s work – its overall direction, its professional execution and her potential for future, continuous excellence in film/video production and related work. I find her work brave, amazing and inspiring.”

—Janet Bergstrom, Professor, Cinema & Media Studies, UCLA (Scholar of Jean Renoir, F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Claire Denis, Chantal Akerman)

Click to view Natasha’s CV (PDF)

Selected Reviews and Interviews: