Josephine Decker is a filmmaker and performer whose work delves into women’s interiority, bending the space between imagination and reality. Her feature film Madeline’s Madeline thrusts the audience into the ever-shifting first-person perspective of her main character. Madeline’s Madeline, scripted through a devised process with ten actors, played Sundance, Berlinale, and scores of festivals worldwide, was hailed as a “mind-scrambling masterpiece” (Indiewire), and was nominated for Best Picture at IFP’s Gotham Awards and for two Independent Spirit Awards.
Said to be ushering in a “new grammar of narrative” by The New Yorker, Decker’s other feature films have received many accolades – Shirley (starring Elisabeth Moss) won Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Auteur Filmmaking, and The Sky Is Everywhere (A24/Apple) was a New York Times Critic’s Pick. Her short film Rise Again — made in collaboration with musicians Daniel Wohl, Grammy winner Arooj Aftab, and with mothers supported by LA’s Upward Bound House—toured with live orchestral accompaniment by Alarm Will Sound alongside work by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Mati Diop, and Manon Lutanie.
Decker wrote and directed a play with Pig Iron Theatre Company in Philadelphia in 2022, which explored complex decisions around pregnancy through a dream lens. She performed from 2008 - 2015 with the Main Squeeze Orchestra, an all-female accordion orchestra in New York City, and she currently performs as part of a clown ensemble in Los Angeles led by Amrita Dhaliwal. Since 2022, she has been making a documentary in collaboration with teen mothers in Dallas, TX. Dallas offers limited access to contraception and health insurance and has the highest repeat teen pregnancy rate in the country. The teen mothers Decker works with improvise, write, and act in short films that create the backbone of the doc.
At MacDowell in 2024, Decker worked on a screenplay inspired by fairy tales, by her time playing in an all-female accordion orchestra, and by the very epic and very ordinary aspects of motherhood. During her 2025 residency, she continued the work on this screenplay, entitled Squeezebox. She also completed feature screenplay drafts of her adaptations of Lanny by Max Porter for the BBC, and of Swamplandia by Karen Russell for FilmNation.
