American filmmaker Todd Haynes was BOTD in 1961. Born in Los Angeles, California, he studied art and semiotics at Brown University, where he met his future producing partner Christine Vachon. He moved to New York to study at Bard College, where he directed the short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a harrowing account of Carpenter’s struggle with bulimia, using Barbie dolls as actors. Richard Carpenter objected to Haynes’ unauthorised use of their music (and several broadly-dropped hints about his being a closeted gay man). The film was subsequently withdrawn from public screenings, but quickly gained a cult following and is now considered a classic of underground cinema. Haynes’ first feature film Poison, a queer-themed triptych based on the writings of Jean Genet, became a central work in the emerging New Queer Cinema movement. His next film Safe, a drama about a Californian housewife suffering from a mysterious environmental illness, inspired by the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Praised as a sophisticated response to the AIDS crisis, Safe was the first of Haynes’ frequent collaborations with actress Julianne Moore. In Velvet Goldmine, Haynes paid tribute to the sexually fluid origins of 1970s Glam Rock, portraying fictionalised (and queered) versions of David Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. He achieved mainstream recognition with Far From Heaven, a melodrama inspired by the films of Douglas Sirk about a 1950s housewife falls in love with her African-American gardener after her husband leaves her for another man. Haynes’ interest in gender and sexual fluidity was intriguingly explored in I’m Not There, an experimental biopic of Bob Dylan played by six actors, including actress Cate Blanchett. Other projects include a television adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel Mildred Pierce and a documentary about seminal indie band The Velvet Underground. His 2014 film Carol, a lesbian romance based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt, was highly acclaimed, and ranked by the British Film Institute in 2016 as the best LGBT film of all time. His most recent film May December was released in 2023. A gay-themed film starring Joaquin Phoenix was abandoned in 2024 after Phoenix abruptly left the project before filming began. Haynes lives in Portland with his partner Bryan O’Keefe.