Guide Note

Kimberly Peirce is an American film director and screenwriter whose first feature film, Boys Don't Cry, earned star Hilary Swank an Academy Award. Her second feature, Stop Loss, about the war in Iraq, was released in 2008.

Fast Facts

1. Name: Kimberly Ane Peirce
2. Born: September 8, 1967
3. Birth Place: Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
4. Directed an episode of The L Word
5. Lives with lesbian partner Evren Savci
6. Stop Loss premiered at the 2008 South by Southwest Film Festival

Early Career

Although born in Harrisburg, Peirce attended high school in Florida and undergrad at the University of Chicago where she studied Japanese literature and moved to Kobe, Japan for a few years to work as a model and photographer. Peirce returned to the U.S. and enrolled in grad school at Columbia University for film. It was at Columbia that Peirce read an article about a transgender teen in Nebraska named Brandon Teena who was raped and murdered. The article inspired Peirce to make the story her thesis project in 1995 and four years later developed the project into a feature film called, Boys Don't Cry.

Quotes

On making Stop Loss, "I made a decision and said, for the next one, I'm not going to accept any development money. I'm going to use all my own money, I'm going to buy the tapes, I'm going to buy the camera. I just followed my curiosity and my passion, as I'd done on "Boys" and as I'd done on "Silent Star." The difference was that nobody owned the material. I owned it. So I did research all around the country, interviewed real soldiers, interviewed my brother who was fighting in Iraq, interviewed my mother."