Maria Schrader

The recorded working language is German. Work by Maria Schrader is recorded in the collections of Harvard Film Archive. Distinctions recorded are Silver Bear for Best Actress, European Film Award – People's Choice Award for Best European Film, Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Dramatic Special and Berliner Bär.

Schrader was born in Hanover and studied at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna, Austria. She is especially well known from the film Aimée & Jaguar, as well as the acclaimed Liebesleben ("Love life") that she wrote, produced, and in which she acted. She has also written other films: RobbyKallePaul; I Was on Mars; Stille Nacht and Meschugge. She co-directed I Was on Mars with Dani Levy, whom she dated until 1999. Schrader was part of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2000 and is again in the 2025 jury. Schrader played the part of Martin Rauch's aunt in Deutschland 83 (2015), an 8 episode TV series, which was the first German-language TV series to be broadcast on US television. It also became popular in the UK, airing in early 2016 on Channel 4. In 2020 Schrader directed the Netflix miniseries Unorthodox, for which she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series. She directed the 2022 film She Said, starring Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan. Though Schrader's most popular roles as an actor are of the Jewish faith, and many of her films as a screenwriter and director include Jewish characters and revolve around Jewish struggles, Schrader herself is not Jewish.

2016 German Film Awards, Best Director for Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe (Original title in German: Vor der Morgenröte)