Australian filmmaker Ana Kokkinos was BOTD in 1958. Born in Melbourne to a Greek-Australian family, she came out as lesbian at 15. She studied law at Monash University, practicing as a commercial lawyer for nine years. In 1991, she studied filmmaking at the Victorian College of the Arts. Her graduation short film Antamasi, a portrait of three generations of Greek-Australian women, won several industry awards and played at international film festivals. She made a dazzling feature film debut with 1998’s Head On, an adrenalin-pumped portrait of 48 hours in the life of a young closeted Greek-Australian man, based on Christos Tsioklas‘ novel Loaded. A critical and commercial success, it made a star of its gorgeous (and frequently naked) leading man Alex Dimitriades, and won an AFI Award for co-star Paul Capsis as a trans drag queen. Praised and decried for its frank depictions of gay sex, drug-taking, police brutality towards gays and perceived stereotyping of the Greek-Australian community, Head On became one of the year’s most debated films and a sleeper international hit. Kokkinos went on to direct several episodes of cult 1990s TV series The Secret Life of Us, exploring a similarly sexual fluid youth milieu in contemporary Melbourne. She returned to feature filmmaking in the 2000s with the The Book of Revelation, a harrowing drama about a man kidnapped and repeatedly raped by three masked women, and the mother-daughter drama Blessed. Her recent work includes the 2019 TV drama series The Hunting and the 2021 anthology film Here Out West. Kokkinos lives in Melbourne and is in a long-term relationship with screenwriter Mira Robertson.