Real name: Елеоно́ра Деренко́вська (Eleonora Derenkovskaya)

Effective period / Period of releases: 1953

Born April 29, 1917 in Kiev (Ukraine). Died October 13, 1961 in New York (USA). Maya Deren was an Ukranian-born American avant-garde filmmaker and film theorist of the 1940s and 1950s, as well as choreographer, dancer, poet, writer and photographer. She was highly educaed and designed (some of) her own clothes. Her father Solomon Derenkowsky was a Jewish psychologist who had fled to New York in 1922. Her mother Gitel-Malka (Marie) Fiedler was a musician and dancer who had studied these arts in Kiev. Deren lived in New York for most of her life, but lived in Los Angeles between 1940 and 1944, where she met her 2nd husband filmmaker Alexander Hammid. Composer Teiji Ito was her 3rd husband until her death. He said that "Maya was always a Russian. In Haiti she was a Russian. She was always dressed up, talking, speaking many languages and being a Russian."